Air Date 2/25/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Racism is at the core of most of what Trump believes, so it should be no surprise when he aligns himself and the country with explicitly supremacist projects, like the perceived Jewish supremacy over Palestinians, and the assumed reverse racism against white South Africans.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Pod Save the World; Today, Explained; What Next?; American Prestige; The Majority Report; The Ralph Nader Radio Hour; Rev Left Radio; and The ReidOut.
Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in five sections: Section A, Trump's Gaza proposal; Section B, Afrikaners and Trump; Section C, West Bank violence; Section D, Historical context; and Section E, Resistance.
Trumps Insane Plan To Own Gaza - Pod Save the World - Air Date 2-12-25
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Shortly after we recorded last week, President Trump announced that in addition to his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, [00:01:00] he also wants the US to occupy it indefinitely and deny those people he will displace the right to return home.
Trump advisors reportedly didn't know he was going to announce this Gaza occupation plan before he did it. And then they seem to try to walk it all back. But then Trump is just doubling down over and over again. Let's listen to a super cut of some of the things he said about this in the last couple of days.
CLIP DONALD TRUMP: I'm committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we're committed to owning it, taking it.
JOURNALIST: Mr. President, take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.
CLIP DONALD TRUMP: Under the US authority. We're not going to buy anything. We're going to have it. We're going to keep it. And we're going to make sure that there's going to be peace.
We'll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people. We'll build beautiful communities, safe communities. It would be a beautiful piece of land.
JOURNALIST: Would the Palestinians have the right to return?
CLIP DONALD TRUMP: No, they wouldn't, because they're going to have much better housing, much better. [00:02:00] In other words, I'm talking about building a permanent place for them.
JOURNALIST: But what about the Palestinians who just won't leave? We've spoken, our team has spoken to millions of Palestinians.
CLIP DONALD TRUMP: They're all going to leave when they have a place that's a better alternative. When they have a nice place that's safe, they're all going to leave. It's a hell hole right now.
JOURNALIST: But how are you so sure? Will the US force them to leave?
CLIP DONALD TRUMP: You're going to see that they're all going to want to leave.
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: So, no surprise that this plan didn't go over all that well in Arab capitals, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan.
On Monday, in advance of King Abdullah of Jordan's visit to the White House on Tuesday, today when we're recording, Trump also said he would consider withholding aid from Egypt and Jordan if they refuse to take in Palestinians. For those who don't know, Jordan and Egypt are some of the top recipients of US military aid, and have been for decades, in large part because both countries cut the first peace deals with Israel, and the stability of those governments is seen as the cornerstone for peace in the entire region.
So Ben, a lot of, there's a lot of debate about this announcement and people wondering if Trump's serious or if he's bluffing and setting up a negotiating [00:03:00] position.
I think I'd argue that the reaction we're seeing in the Middle East and the pressure this conversation put on King Abdullah, who was like sitting there, literally -- he looked like he was being physically squeezed between Trump and his own population in the Oval Office -- that just shows that it doesn't really matter, in addition to being illegal and unethical, calling for the forced migration of Gazans into Jordan, is already destabilizing the Jordanian government.
And, Abdullah might've bought himself some time in this Oval Office meeting by saying he'd taken 2000 kids from Gaza who are suffering from dire medical conditions, but I doubt the Trump pressure campaign stops here.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: No. And let's just point out for a second, Tommy, that a lot of people in the US have been in this kind of mode since the election of taking Trump more seriously as this kind of dynamic political figure who was able to build a winning coalition, and have projected onto him a competence that he doesn't have. And this is [00:04:00] clearly evidence of that. This idea is an absolute dead on arrival, crazy thing to be talking about. It's ethnic cleansing of 2 million people that don't want to leave. It is existential to Jordan and Egypt that don't want to take people in.
But to gracefully plug something I wrote about this in the New York Times over the weekend, and the point I want to pull out of that is two things. And even if this doesn't happen, cause it's almost impossible to foresee how this would happen. And despite the fact that he's been taking questions, he hasn't, when he says he wants to buy it, it's not clear who he's buying it from. When he says he wants to own it, he's not clear how he wants to take ownership. They want to deny that US troops have anything to do with it. But how else could the US take possession of Gaza without troops?
But the two things that I want to underscore are, first of all, just by talking about this in the way that he has the last couple of weeks, in addition to what he said about Greenland and Panama and Canada, I guess, he is completely ignoring the concept of state [00:05:00] sovereignty, which is the cornerstone of the international legal system that was built after World War II to prevent big nations from just swallowing up smaller ones or grabbing territory like we used to do back in the colonial days.
And the reason that's so dangerous is because that interacts with what Vladimir Putin's trying to do in taking chunks of Ukraine, or what China might want to do in taking Taiwan, or what Israel might want to do in the West Bank and Gaza: it's treating land like real estate instead of sovereign territory where people live. That's the first thing.
Then the second thing is just the total disregard for the opinion of the Palestinians. He has not even solicited the opinion of a single Palestinian to inform this plan to take over Gaza. And there are two million people that live there and don't want to leave there. And it just suggests we're going back in time to this pre-World War period where big powers just took land and made deals over the heads of smaller countries or less powerful people. [00:06:00] And that led to two world wars. That's why we set up a whole system of international laws to prevent things like this from happening.
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yeah. And just again to hammer this home. half the population of Jordan is Palestinian. The king doesn't want another huge influx of Palestinians into his country for a bunch of reasons, but starting with the fact that it could topple his regime.
But on top of that, Palestinians don't want Jordan to become the de facto Palestinian state because it could deny them the right to return home to areas where they were displaced from in '67 or '48 or wherever in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza. And then Jordanians don't want a huge influx of Palestinians because they want Jordan to be Jordan, not Palestine. So the Jordanians hate Trump's plan.
And then he's also leaning hard on the Egyptians to take in a bunch of people. But Egypt is struggling from massive economic problems. They're currently relying on big loans from the EU and the IMF, and in recent years have taken in a ton of refugees from Sudan, Syria, Yemen, name your country. And they're struggling with that burden. And they don't want Hamas [00:07:00] to reconstitute. If you displace a big chunk of the Gazan population into Egypt, Hamas reconstitutes there and then attacks Israel from Egypt, that could lead to an Israeli response into Egypt. They don't want that to happen. And they also, and Sisi and the leaders in Egypt also don't want Hamas to stir shit up and build support for Islamist parties within Egypt themselves.
So, Trump just rolled this grenade into the Middle East with this plan. And everyone else were just watching to see if this thing is going to explode. It's a disaster.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yes, and you're right about what you said about Jordan. Look, King Abdullah is married to a Palestinian. There are millions of Palestinians who live in Jordan on the east bank, and that's often been a source of some tension because of Jordan's peace treaty with Israel. And so if King Abdullah were to participate in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by taking in some of these two million Palestinians who don't want to leave Gaza, I really don't know if his regime could survive that. I just, [00:08:00] I think that the boiling frustration with what is already not a very good economic circumstance, with already displaced Palestinians, could get out of hand.
And similarly in Egypt, where you have a brittle military dictatorship with a lot of anger seething underneath, that could explode too, particularly if you have Hamas introduced into that equation.
It also is relevant, Tommy, that USAID funds a significant amount of assistance into Jordan that that government really relies on. And for all Trump's talk--
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: That they've already budgeted.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: That they've already budgeted.
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: They think already have, yeah.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yeah and so I guess it could go hat in hand to the Gulf states and ask them to fill this gap that USAID provided. But it's not just money that USCAD provides to Jordan, it's expertise. It's help in running certain government programs. That's being yanked away. Trump talks about rebuilding life for Gazans. Guess which agency does that? USAID. And USAID already cannot really fulfill its obligations under the ceasefire agreement, just the short term ceasefire agreement. When you [00:09:00] think about the long term needs in Gaza to clear rubble, to demobilize and destroy unexploded bombs that are littering Gaza, nevermind temporary housing and then long term housing. Without USAID, I don't know how that gets done.
Elon's African roots - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-13-25
NOEL: When does Donald Trump become interested in South Africa, and why?
CHRIS: So there's a group in South Africa, which describes itself as an Afrikaner rights group called AfriForum. And, the Southern Poverty Law Center's described it as "white supremacists in a suit and a tie." The leadership of that group came to the United States in 2018, and amongst other things, they appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
<CLIP> FOX NEWS:
Tucker Carlson: “South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.”
CHRIS: They laid out the case that whites were the victims of discrimination in South Africa, but particularly latched onto this issue of the killing of white farmers…
<CLIP> FOX NEWS:
Ernst Roots: ”Basically threatening white farmers, that if they do not voluntarily hand over [00:10:00] their land to Black people, then there would be a violent takeover. So, the situation is very dire in South Africa. They would be tortured to death and it would receive very little news coverage.”
CHRIS: …which is totally untrue. But they appeared on Tucker Carlson, Trump was watching, this is when he's president in 2018, and he tweets to his then-Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, telling him to watch the situation in South Africa with the whites, and how they're being victimized. And others pick up on this around the States afterwards…
NOEL: Huh.
CHRIS: …and it starts to gain some momentum.
NOEL: In the meantime, President Trump has become very close to Elon Musk, who, of course, is a white South African. Do we know whether Elon Musk's ideas about South Africa have influenced Donald Trump at all?
CHRIS: Well, you'd have to assume they did, because there's no real explanation otherwise as to why Trump is so engaged with this issue.
NOEL: Hm.
CHRIS: Why, three weeks into his second term of office, he's suddenly issuing this executive order about one country. [00:11:00] So, one has to imagine that it's Elon Musk, who was born in apartheid South Africa and grew up there, left at 18. But he's not the only one. There's a group of white men that all have apartheid South African childhoods in some form or other, known as the PayPal Mafia. They all get to know each other at the top of PayPal. They all get rich through PayPal. These include the billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel. Now, Thiel was born in Germany, but his father took him to South Africa at a young age. And then the other kind of two major players are a guy called David Sacks, who is another tech billionaire. He's now Trump's AI and crypto czar. He was born in Cape Town, although his parents moved to Tennessee when he was five. So he did not grow up fully imbued with the apartheid system, although he grew up in the white South African diaspora of the time.
NOEL: What would life have been like in the 1980s for a kid like Elon Musk growing up under apartheid? [00:12:00] What, was the deal?
CHRIS: It separated every aspect of life. So jobs were reserved only for white people. Interracial marriage and interracial sex was illegal under the Immorality Act. Every aspect of daily life was separate. But Musk's teenage years would have been in a huge tumult of South Africa's uprising against apartheid. By the mid '80s, you've got a state of emergency, you've got civic society constantly protesting, you've got mass arrests, children incarcerated in their thousands.
<CLIP> SOUTH AFRICA NOW:
Kevin Harris: Under the sweeping powers of the state of emergency, an estimated 30,000 people, the majority Black, have been detained.
<CLIP> NBC NEWS:
Robin Lloyd: Cape Town was under siege. Police vehicles on every street corner. The city overwhelmed with protesters defying the government with marches.
<CLIP> STANFORD:
Desmond Tutu: In a situation of injustice and oppression. There can be no neutrality. You have to take sides. You have to say, am I on the side of [00:13:00] justice or am I on the side of injustice?
CHRIS: The country increasingly ungovernable. The army attempting to keep some kind of order in the townships. So, Musk was growing up at this time of incredible turmoil. And on the streets of Pretoria, where he went to school, he would have seen the Afrikaner resistance movement, which was an openly neo-Nazi group that actually modelled its badge on the swastika and had the same colours as the Nazis and marched up and down the streets doing Hitler salutes.
SCORING IN <Stretched Too Thin - BMC>
Errol Musk, Elon's father, has described his parents-in-law as open neo-Nazis and fascists…
NOEL: Hm.
CHRIS: …and supporters, enthusiastic supporters of apartheid.
<CLIP> PODCAST AND CHILL WITH MACG:
Errol Musk: They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.
CHRIS: Now, Errol himself a member of something called the Progressive Federal Party. And that really was a small opposition party in Parliament, opposed to apartheid.
<CLIP> LBC:
Errol Musk: We never supported apartheid, really, but it was something [00:14:00] we inherited from the European countries.
CHRIS: But leaves the party eventually in the 1980s because it was advocating one person, one vote. In other words, complete equality of democracy. And he didn't agree with that. He was like a lot of white South Africans of that era, particularly English speakers who were doing quite well out of the economics of apartheid, who said that they were against it in principle, but actually didn't do very much to oppose it, and certainly benefited from it enormously. And so he was the liberal in the family, but obviously only up to a point.
SCORING OUT
NOEL: So to bring us back to the present day, has Elon Musk said anything about white South Africans and what he believes is happening in that country right now?
CHRIS: Yes, he's had plenty to say. He's retweeted or commented on tweets that essentially argue that there's either a genocide underway against whites…
NOEL: Huh.
CHRIS: …or a genocide [00:15:00] coming. He recently openly challenged the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, on Twitter, accusing him of imposing racist discriminatory laws against white people. So he's very much taken an adversarial position on this, which I suspect at least goes some way to explain why Trump has done the same.
NOEL: One thing we learned during the first Trump administration was that Donald Trump and the people close to him often have more than one motive for their beliefs. And some things that might seem ideological are not ideological or are less ideological than we might think. Does Elon Musk have any other incentive to push Donald Trump to take a stand on this – other than thinking white South Africans are being discriminated against?
CHRIS: Well, as it happens, we watch Musk's commentary on white South Africans ramp up at a time when he was starting to get into conflict with the South African government [00:16:00] over Starlink, his satellite business.
NOEL: Huh!
SCORING IN <Building Blocks B - BMC>
Trumps South Africa Fixation - What Next - Air Date 2-12-25
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: You know, I hear theories about folks being motivated to behave in certain ways because of their childhoods, and it makes me slightly suspicious, just because, I don't know, people grow up and they change their minds. Do you think Musk could have other motivations for why he'd be so interested in South Africa, tweeting so voraciously about it?
CHRIS MCGREAL: I think certainly there are business interests involved for Musk right now. For many years, he paid little attention to South Africa and It's notable that he has started to latch onto this idea that Whites are victims of discrimination, of being persecuted through a new kind of racist system, just as he's also been trying to get his Starlink into the country and run into South Africa's Black empowerment laws, which essentially require Black ownership of a chunk [00:17:00] of the company. I think it's about 30 percent depending on the business you're in. Musk is portraying that as a racist law, as a racist anti-White law, when it's a legitimate attempt to make sure that Black people have investments in the economy and benefiting from the economy as White people have done.
But it's notable that Musk has ramped up this whole idea that there's White genocide, Whites are being persecuted, a new racist system, just as he's also trying to get the terms on which Starlink could do business in South Africa changed.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah, tell me more about what this Starlink contract could mean for Musk and his businesses and what it could mean for South Africa.
CHRIS MCGREAL: Well, the idea would be that Starlink... so, you know, South Africa being a huge sprawling country with large rural areas that are difficult to get conventional kind of internet lines to and all of the rest, it would provide some kind of service for farmers and for others who live in rural areas.
So, there would be [00:18:00] a few hundred million, I believe, would be invested in this and he would expect to get a good return from that. That's why we're going in to do it. it's interesting to note that he's being backed in this. There's a petition been raised by AfriForum, which is this Afrikaner rights group that's been accused of being essentially a White supremacist group and which has done much to make the false claims of White genocide here in the United States and to push them towards Trump.
It's now adopting Musk's language and saying that essentially he's being blocked because of his race and that actually having Starlink in South Africa would help save the lives of White farmers who don't have good communications. So, you can see now the merging of those two things of this long term campaign by AfriForum to persuade the Trump administration that they're victims of the post-apartheid order, with their direct backing now of Musk's business interests and claims.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Elon [00:19:00] Musk and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke by phone last week. Do we know what was said on this phone call?
CHRIS MCGREAL: Essentially, Ramaphosa was trying to get Musk to get Trump to dial back both the rhetoric and the threats and the cutoff of aid and all of the rest.
I'm sure Musk had something to say about Starlink. We know, from before this, that the South African government has been considering allowing Musk to bypass the Black empowerment requirement, for Black businesses to have a stake in his Starlink cooperation in South Africa, by allowing him to invest in other social programs to an equal value.
So, South Africa is saying, Well, look, maybe we can work around that. And I would imagine that that would also have been part of the call as Ramaphosa tries to diffuse this whole thing.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: You know, I'm wondering if you can step back a little bit, because you reported from South Africa during the end of apartheid, right?
CHRIS MCGREAL: I did. [00:20:00]
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: I wonder how that experience maps on to what you're seeing now in the United States as someone who reports from here. Is there anything that strikes you about this transition to this new administration where you think, I was in this totally different place. I can understand what's happening here in a way that maybe the people who've been in this place the whole time can't.
CHRIS MCGREAL: Yes, I suppose the closest parallel is with this narrative that turns the oppressors into the victims, I think. And you're now getting a narrative in the United States that is an attempt to say that people who actually have often been in the best position in this country are the victims. Hence, the attack on DEI, hence the attack on people who aren't White in general in some ways. So I think that kind of massaging of the narrative, the flipping of who is really at a disadvantage here, [00:21:00] who is really in charge, it's a clear parallel.
But there are, you know, I'm kind of hesitant to draw parallels, direct parallels, with the apartheid system and years because that was such a complex and individual thing to South Africa. What you have to remember there is that more than 80 percent of the population was Black and 8 percent at that point of the population was White and they were ruling the country. So, there are different forces at work here. I do think that the attack on the courts and the rule of law that may be emerging in this country, we're just seeing the first flickers of it with the reactions from J. D. Vance and others to the judge's orders on the various actions that have been taken by Musk and his DOGE, may also prove a parallel in time.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah. it's interesting. I see this administration taking aim at diversity, equity and inclusion stuff, which really hasn't been enforced with a full force of law. [00:22:00] And what I see with the Trump administration taking on South Africa is a country that really has tried to grapple with explicit racism and what made apartheid possible and do that through rules about Black business ownership and land ownership. And it makes sense that that country. would be a target for a place that's going so aggressively after DEI. You know?
CHRIS MCGREAL: Well, I think one of the things you see with Musk and Thiel and others of these libertarians that emerged from apartheid South Africa is that they imagined that at the end of apartheid, it was some kind of level playing field and everybody was just beginning at the starting line and they should just pull their socks up and get on with it. And it's an insane idea, given the huge disadvantages that the majority of the population had, not least in education.
Musk benefited from an incredibly good education in one of the best schools in Pretoria. And the idea that the end of apartheid meant that he [00:23:00] was on a beginning at the same starting line as somebody who grew up in a Black township just outside of Pretoria, is ridiculous. But this is very much the idea that Musk and Thiel push. And I think you see the re-domination of that idea in this country, too.
American Jews, Israel, and Palestine w Peter Beinart - American Prestige - Air Date 2-11-25
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: And so what role do you think that the peace process plays in American Jewish memory? Because I think it's actually really key to what happened in Gaza and what's been going on in Israel for the last 10, 15 years in your own community.
PETER BEINART: Right. So, the idea is that basically Palestinians deserve what they get now because they had this opportunity to have their own country and they blew it.
And people don't even use the [unintelligible], people will say, 1947, and I mean they have this whole litany again. These are like statements that kind of, I don't know, it's almost like you push F1 on your keyboard, right? And people repeat them over and over again, as you know, because you're a historian. But if you look at actual scholarship on these things, you actually find there's not really very much scholarly support for this [00:24:00] narrative of they never miss an opportunity, to miss an opportunity, right?
In reality, at each of these junctures, the things that are being offered to Palestinians, if one tries to spend a moment thinking about a Palestinian perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why these things are deeply inadequate from their perspective. But yes, I think this becomes this weird way of kind of saying, okay, now Israel is absolved of all responsibility. Which just doesn't make any sense. Like, even if it were true that the Palestinians had really screwed up 20 years ago, it's like I sometimes imagine, let's imagine that Martin Luther King goes to meet with Lyndon Johnson and Lyndon Johnson says, here's the legislative, here's the civil rights and voting rights act. And the King says, not good enough, screw you. And so it doesn't get passed. And then you say, Well, 20 more years of segregation, they had it coming, right? It just doesn't make any sense, right? Even if you did believe that Palestinians bore all the responsibility. But I do think this is a way, these are the things that people say to allow them to sleep [00:25:00] at night, to allow them to basically to see what's happening in Gaza or the West Bank and be able to say, yeah, that looks really bad. But it's not our fault as a community and it's not the fault of the state that we love.
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: And this brings us very naturally to what I wanted to talk about next, which is this process of Palestinian dehumanization amongst American Jews and Israelis as well, but I think we're focusing more on America here.
My ultimate, almost macro level, historical perspective is that the Jewish dehumanization of Palestinian people is almost the cost of becoming fully White in the settler-colonial project of European modernity. That you have the apex of the Jew as 'other' is in the Holocaust. Europe is now Judenrein. That Hitler succeeded, Europe is, not a hundred percent, but not what it was. It is now free of Jews in a real sense. Jews were granted by the Western powers their own settler-colonial state in the Middle East. And the price of becoming fully [00:26:00] enfranchised in the Western mind, or what in academic parlance might be called becoming White, but you don't even need becoming White, people know what I mean. Becoming part of the community comes at the cost of Palestinian dehumanization. And that this is the ultimate sort of path of the Jewish people in modernity since roughly 1500.
I'm just curious what you think about that. And then more broadly, what do you think about Palestinian dehumanization and how it came to be that what happened in Gaza is viewed as in any way, shape, or form acceptable.
PETER BEINART: Yeah, there's so much there. Part of Palestinian dehumanization, to take the context that you're talking about, is simply the dehumanization of people in the colonial world or post-colonial world, who are just considered to be backward and not deserving of the same rights and status as everybody else. And, that's still in Europe...
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: this is of course what the Jews were, internally colonized people, some might say, in Europe themselves, and then they transfer. [00:27:00] Yeah.
PETER BEINART: But the Jews are, on the one hand, Europe's 'other'. And on the other hand, the Jews who create the Zionist movement are very, very European. And so they are thinking about... You know, Said says that it's not coincidence Zionism is born in the high age of imperialism, right? That the notions that the Zionists had about what they were doing in Palestine was very similar to what non-Jewish Europeans were trying to do in other parts of the world.
So, when Herzl writes to Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist of Southern Africa, and says, Hey, you should support what we're doing because it's a lot like what you're doing. That's not really surprising, right? These are European projects.
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: He's an Austro-Hungarian and the Austro-Hungarian empire is very different from the British overseas empire. So, the move, I think, to Western Europe is actually crucial for Herzl because he's emergent from a very cosmopolitan space and you have another Austrian, like Karl Popper, developing cosmopolitan ideology and that actually you just all should [00:28:00] live in the cities. So, as Herzl moves west, he becomes more almost like genocidal—genocidal is not the right word, but he becomes more colonial. That's probably the right word.
PETER BEINART: And, famously there's a debate. But famously he was in Paris during the Dreyfus Trial and some people say that that's when he lost his belief in European liberalism. So yes, and obviously it's important to say that there were other Jews, many, many other Jews who had different visions of how to solve the Jewish question, whether it was Marxism or liberalism or some kind of nationalism experience that could be exist in Europe, Bundism or these kind of things.
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: But capitalism, right? Everyone's equal on the market. I think that's Soros. That's why Soros became, it's like everyone's equal on the market. Now you're just, how much money you can move around? And I think that's really actually important to understand.
PETER BEINART: But when you think about today though, I think you're also right that, certainly, on the political right in the United States, in Europe, and even [00:29:00] in the center to some degree, I think the esteem that people have for Jews is very much connected to the Israeli project and the fact that Israel in some ways is, for a lot of folks, a kind of more successful version of the kind of settler-colonial state than they see in their own countries.
In some ways, imagine if you're a right wing Canadian or Australian and you think, Oh my gosh, we have these land acknowledgements all over the place. Like, we go around flagellating ourselves all the time for this kind of thing. Look at Israel, right? They don't feel this sense of self hatred. They're proudly, strongly nationalistic. They believe in the kids serve in the military. They have an immigration policy that maintains their demographic majority. They haven't all become secular. This is what we want in the west more generally. And I think that's obviously completely connected to the dehumanization and degradation of Palestinians and what makes [00:30:00] Israel such an icon for so many people around the world in the west and beyond the West, Narendra Modi too.
West Bank Annexation Inevitable - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-6-25
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Can you talk a little bit more about that, Zach? Like, that being such an escalation because people that may not be as familiar with the distinction between like the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza's bombed all the time. The West Bank is bombed occasionally, but it's mostly this rolling violence and seizure of land and vigilantes and IDF people shooting people and killing them in a more targeted way.
ZACHARY FOSTER: The West Bank is divided into three areas. These three areas being area A, B, and C as a result of the Oslo process. And area C, which has about 150, 000 Palestinians, Israeli soldiers and Israeli settlers have been terrorizing Palestinians on a daily basis for decades. And, ramping up in the past year. We've seen dozens. I think two dozen communities uprooted and ethnically cleansed primarily from area C. We're talking more than 1, 500 Palestinians ethically cleansed from Area C in [00:31:00] just the past 15 and a half months. Then you have Area B, places like Sebastia, in the West Bank, which are now also increasingly coming under threat. We're talking about, how many Palestinians in an area, would be about 500, 000. They're also now facing, these are the sort of semi-rural small towns of the West Bank, they've been facing increasing attacks by settlers.
And now area A, the area with the overwhelming majority of the population of the West Bank, the urban centers, Ramallah, Beit Lahem, Nablus, Jenin, Tul Karem, Hebron, Khalid, these areas are now facing a new level of violence, a level of violence that Palestinians in these areas have not seen in decades. These are areas like Jenin, Annapolis, where the Israeli military is sending multiple, we're talking thousands of Israeli soldiers on the ground, ripping up streets, tearing up civilian infrastructure, destroying the water infrastructure, destroying hundreds of homes, destroying roads, destroying hospitals.
In January, just last month, the Israeli military entered a hospital, [00:32:00] I believe it was in Jenin, and killed three Palestinians. So, these are undercover operations taken, carried out by the Israeli military in civilian areas, dressed up as Palestinian civilians, carrying out the crime of perfidy in international law, which is feigning status as a civilian during armed hostilities in order to kill Palestinians. They're doing it in the West Bank. They've been doing it in Gaza, by the way, as well. Recall that in the Nuseirat refugee camp in this past summer, when the Israeli military entered that refugee camp to rescue four Israeli hostages, they killed 274 Palestinians at the same time.
And it was during that operation where they feigned status as both Palestinian civilians and as Palestinian aid workers. And so they're doing that in Gaza, they're doing that in the West Bank as well. It's a very frightening time right now for everyone in the West Bank, not only because they're dramatically expanding the military campaigns in the West Bank, both in the tactics and in the methods and in the strategies and area A, B and C, as we already said, but [00:33:00] we're also now getting a confirmation that the plan really is annexation. We've known this all along, but if you follow the reports of B'Tselem, and if you follow the reports of Peace Now, every week, every month, the Israeli civilian administration takes another step and people think annexation is like, one day it's not annexed, the next day it is. That's not how it works. It's an incremental process, every week, every month, there's a new policy, a new regulation, which gradually incorporates the West Bank into the Israeli civilian administration.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And It was announced this morning that the Israeli military has been told by higher ups to begin to plan to remove those remaining Palestinians from Gaza. And what that removal looks like is going to be incredibly violent. Can you react to that instruction? And give us some historical context about how many times Israel has tried to ethically cleanse Gaza, and they've failed. So, bad record. [00:34:00]
ZACHARY FOSTER: First of all, what we hear and what we see from Gaza is that Palestinians have no intent on leaving. So any kind of relocation effort is going to be forcible. It's not going to be voluntary. And Israel always blurs the lines between forced relocation and voluntary relocation. They forced Palestinians historically, as you pointed out. Israel has attempted to relocate, i. e. ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Gaza on countless occasions. They tried to do it in '48. It was through American pressure, 1948, it was through American pressure, the American most senior diplomat in Israel at the time, told the Israeli military, this is the end of the war, in late '48, early 1949: no, you're going to withdraw your troops from Gaza Strip and Sinai now. And it was only because of that American pressure in 1948-49, that Gaza wound up in the hands of Egypt rather than Israel.
And then in '56, when Israel re-invaded the Gaza Strip, they slaughtered, they went on a campaign, they slaughtered 150 Palestinians in Khan [00:35:00] Yunis, they slaughtered another 100 in Rafah, with the goal to incentivize flight. The same thinking that they adopted in '48 was you slaughter a few hundred here, incentivize the rest to leave this They did the same thing in '56, except '56 was not '48 and the Palestinians did not leave. Only about a thousand left after those massacres and then when the Israeli prime minister at the time realized he could not compel Palestinians to leave by force, they started to develop plans to figure out ways of, ridding Gaza of its Palestinian refugees. When they reoccupied Gaza in '67, they did the same thing. They developed a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And this was at the highest levels. The Israeli cabinet met on June 18th and June 19th, 1967. They made a few decisions. One of which was we will annex Gaza, after we can, after we're able to rid the population of most of its refugees. That was the decision made in June 1967, a week after Israel conquered that territory. And then from the period June 1967 to December [00:36:00] 1967, Israel settled on a plan to depopulate this strip. And, basically from the end of the war in '67, until about the end of 1969-1970. Israel compelled 70, 000 Palestinians in Gaza to leave. And then from 1970-1972, Israel realized they weren't going to be able to compel more than that through these incentive programs, and so they did it by force.
And Ariel Sharon enters the Gaza Strip in 1971 with a plan to "thin out" the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. They enter the refugee... they first enter Jabali in 1971, they displace hundreds of families, they expel 12, 000 Palestinian family members of fighters. So these are innocent civilians by Israel's own admission. They expel them to Sinai. They continue in 1972. They try more attempts in 1974 and 1976. But the whole plan all along, well into the 1990s, is to rid Gaza of its refugees. Anyone who leaves the Gaza Strip or the [00:37:00] West Bank for more than three years is not able to return. They lose their residency rights.
Israel has been in a constant effort over the past 56 years in Gaza and the West Bank to figure out ways of getting them out, of pushing them out, because Zionism is a political philosophy that says, how do we create a Jewish state in a land that's mostly non-Jewish? How do we create Jewish domination and Jewish control in a land that is mostly non-Jewish? Well, the easiest way of doing it is just getting rid of all those non-Jews.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: By killing or by forcible transfer, and that is what Zionism is, folks. And I think people are starting to wake up to the contradictions of what liberal Zionism is and what we need to do. Although we still need, one, and I was saying this before the show, the evolution in this conversation is an endorsement of a one democratic state from the river to the sea. And we have still yet to see a politician in this country make that case, even the good ones that are standing up for genocide, against genocide. That is what the solution needs to be. Like South Africa, it must be imposed upon [00:38:00] them.
Israelis and Palestinians Standing Together - Ralph Nader Radio Hour - Air Date 2-15-25
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Listeners, this group standing together is an enormously courageous group, given all the repression that's going on now and the censorship against dissent by the Netanyahu regime. I want to ask you the first question, tell us a little bit about your group, how involved the Arab Israelis are with the Israeli Jews that are the core of your mission and why you're named Standing Together, and whether you're growing in these times of tumult.
ALON-LEE GREEN: Thank you for these questions. And yes, Standing Together is a Jewish Palestinian movement in Israel, bringing together the Jewish citizens of Israel and the Palestinian citizens of Israel to fight together for peace, against the war, against the occupation, for equality, for social justice. And we are growing in the last 16 months, since October 7th, since the war started. At the beginning, it was terrible. It was lonely. It was, you know, a nightmare that [00:39:00] didn't stop since then. But in the last few months, we created enough space for our message to be heard and accepted by many more than the beginning of the war.
We believe our message is just the common sense. If we control, militarily control, millions of people that are not the citizens of Israel, we will never be safe. If we refuse to go to peace, we will have endless wars. If we keep on building settlements in the West Bank and keep oppressing Palestinians wherever they live on the land, we, as Jewish people, will never have safety and a quiet life.
So we call for peace. We call for Israeli Palestinian peace. And we bring together the two main groups of our society inside the Israeli country. And it has been tough, but it's also have been hopeful to see that despite of all the hatred and the violence and the grief and the sorrow, we are able to stand together to create this space where Jews and Palestinians can grieve together, can cry sometimes [00:40:00] together, but also can dream of a better future together and act for this future.
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Well, on December 13th in the New York Times, Alon-Lee, sixteen Israeli human rights groups, B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Refusenik, Rabbis for Human Rights, and others, called on President Biden to stop what they called "the catastrophe in Gaza". And that was an outstanding statement at the time, and the press didn't pick it up, there were no editorials, it just spoke for itself.
But, what it said to the American people who read that open letter to Biden is that there are very courageous people in Israel who understand the basic principles of Judaism, who understand what a democracy is all about, including dissent being the mother of almost all assent, and who are not just speaking out, but they're actually organizing demonstrations.
Standing Together organized [00:41:00] the biggest demonstration, calling for a ceasefire agreement, hostage deal since October 7th, drawing tens of thousands to the streets across the country. And with that background, I want to ask you the question: what's the status of the Arab Israelis? They must be under tremendous pressure. They've been very quiet. There have been no reports of any violence by them or against them. But maybe that's because the media is not reporting much about Arab Israelis.
Could you tell us about them and what their numbers are and how many of them have risen to become doctors and pharmacists?
ALON-LEE GREEN: Yeah, it's a very good question. A context is to say that 20 percent of all the citizens of Israel are Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can call them Arab Israelis. A lot of them would prefer to be called Palestinian citizens of Israel.
They are part of the Palestinian people living on the same land that Jews live. Roughly the numbers of Jews on the land are 7 million. The Palestinians are also 7 million. 2 [00:42:00] million of them are citizens of the Israeli state and live in either solely Palestinian cities or mixed cities together with Jews like Haifa and Jaffa and Lod and Ramle and Akko.
In the last 20 years, we see a big shift inside this population from being, you know, more traditional. They assimilate much strongly in the society, they go to university, they become doctors, they become pharmacists, they become lawyers, see a lot of meeting places in our society. And, of course, it creates a lot of amazing and good effects on our society, but also it creates a lot of racism and pushbacks from the extreme Jewish right wing in Israel.
Since October 7th, this population, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, have been under great, great attack from the establishment, from the government in Israel, threatening them to not dare to sound a voice, to not dare to stand in solidarity with their families or people in Gaza or the West Bank. And basically they've been persecuted [00:43:00] into being criminalized if you claim that you're Palestinian and not just an Arab, which is a problem because they are Palestinians.
We saw a phenomenon of a lot of students from universities being kicked out of school just because of writing a post on social media, 'don't kill Palestinian children', or saying 'cease fire'. That was a reason to kick them out of school or to even fire doctors from hospitals in Israel. So that was the beginning of the war.
Right now, we do see that more Palestinians in Israel have the support around them to show solidarity with Gaza. Standing Together has become the largest group that is organizing Palestinians in the fight against the war or a ceasefire. We had a huge campaign collecting aid from Israeli cities, mainly Palestinian cities in Israel, to bring into Gaza.
And we saw tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens donating aid to Gaza in a very political campaign that said also, 'stop the war', [00:44:00] 'stop the starvation in Gaza', 'we stand with our people in Gaza'. So basically that's the status right now. You can see more Palestinians in Israel showing up in this struggle, but the fear from the government, from the police, is very, very serious.
On The Ground in Gaza Serving the People in Palestine - Rev Left Radio - Air Date 2-11-25
BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: Can you talk about your, the horrors and the tragedies we understand and, They're worth saying because you need to see the realities and the contours of what's actually happening and the lives actually impacted.
But last time you came on, you talked about your personal relationship with the Palestinians that you met, their generosity, and that was a heartening aspect of it because, under The worst crimes of the century and under unimaginable conditions, there's still a beauty, a love for life, a generosity, to strangers, right?, that is profound and speaks not only to the Palestinian spirit, but to the best of the human spirit. Can you talk about some of the positive relationships that you, might have been able to, develop this time around?
WILLY MASSAY: Yes, one of the relationships I developed was with the kids that were [00:45:00] living in the, sleeping on the hospital hallways.
So every morning I get up, I go get ready, and I'm going to the emergency room. these kids would be outside playing and be waiting. Really? Really? I was like, I don't even know how they remembered my name. But, I started giving them some chocolate that I brought in because these kids have not had chocolate, a piece of chocolate for over, over 14 months or so.
and, so we'll take, they will be asking me, Surah, surah, surah means let's take a picture. Let's take a picture. and we'll take a picture and we'll, they taught, they start teaching me how to count in Arabic. and, I can count up to 20 now. So I'm getting better. the amazing, children.
And these children will be saying, can I come with you to America? Can I see how America looks like? I said, I wish I can take all you to America, but, there's a lot of American people who love you, but there's some who probably will hate you just because you're [00:46:00] from Gaza. But I don't say that to them.
But, they just want to hear America and they're like, Oh, you're from America. How's America? do you know my cousin that his name is so and so? He lives in this city. He drives a Mercedes Benz, right? It's a big big big country, but this is the world view I want folks to remember the world view of these children growing up in Gaza.
Gaza is very small So everybody knows everybody so it's kind of cute in a way that everybody knows everybody if you're looking for someone in Gaza And they want you to somebody will know someone they will find for you but, this is the worldview they see, this is how they look at this, their lens.
I said, no, but I'll keep an eye out, but is that innocence in the beauty of the Palestinian people? I want to tell folks this, I want to tell you all this, Palestinian people are the most resistant, most beautiful, [00:47:00] powerful. people you ever meet, the generosity and the kindness of the people.
It's amazing. one night we were just sitting there and somebody had, Nescafe, two packets of Nescafe. There was like eight of us. So this brother is like, okay, we gotta make Nescafe. I'm looking, how many Nescafe? He's like, Oh, I got two packets. So he brought this tiny little cups of coffee to split that Nescafe of two packets to these eight guys.
And I'm thinking, I am an American and I'm, I have a, I have about maybe 20 Nescafé, packets in my bag. I'm keeping, I'm, trying to, I'm trying to say this all for tomorrow, this for tomorrow. And I'm thinking, why am I worried about tomorrow? Just bring all the Nescafé right now to these brothers.
Let's enjoy it. And these sisters here. What's the point?
BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: Because that's what he was doing.
WILLY MASSAY: That's what he was doing. He's he's, this is all he had. And it's here we go. Let's enjoy it. Let's drink Nescafé. It's the middle of the [00:48:00] night. But meanwhile. as in America, we want to think forward.
Okay. I'm going to preserve this for tomorrow. we keep things, we hoard things and I'm thinking, why am I hoarding Nescafe for the next 20 days? I'm just going to give it out. Let's do it. I can survive without Nescafe. So the generosity and the kindness of the people, it's amazing. I had this respiratory infection when I was there my second week.
I was really, sick, but I said, I am going to work. I'm going to work. You can take me over my dead body. I'll be still be working unless I'm really dead, and this, nurses and doctors, they bringing me herbs like sage and mint is not available. Now it's winter, but somehow somebody's found it.
They're bringing this, all these herbs that some of them, I don't even remember the names. They're like, you drink this with a little honey. They just, there's no honey, but somehow somebody found a tiny little [00:49:00] bottle of honey. They brought it to help me. And the, people I went to take care of, they became my nurses and my doctors, my caretaker, and teachers teaching me about these herbs.
And my, flu cleared. So this is the people that we are watching, that Israel is, ethnically cleansing. And all they're asking is for the world to wake up. Please wake up and, see our cause. Please fight for us. This is all what the Palestinian people are asking.
Note from the Editor on why Israel and Gaza are not are complicated as you may think
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Pod Save the World laying out the dramatically negative potential impacts of Trump's plan for Gaza. Today, Explained explained Trump's interest in South Africa. What Next? dove into Elon Musk's interest and influence on South Africa. American Prestige laid out some historical context of the attempted peace process in Israel and Palestine. The Majority Report looked at the [00:50:00] escalating violence in the West Bank. The Ralph Nader Radio Hour highlighted the Standing Together movement in Israel, comprised of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens. And Rev Left Radio spoke about the enduring human spirit that continues to thrive in Palestine. And those were just the Top Takes, there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new. members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (There's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
If you have questions or would like your comments included in the show, our upcoming topics include the dangers of RFK Jr. and the future of health in America, [00:51:00] and the widespread corruption absolutely endemic to Trump and just about everyone that surrounds him. So get your comments and questions in for those topics or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected].
Now as for today's topic, I just want to highlight something that I think is at the core of a lot of discussion about Israel and Palestine, which is that if you think it's complicated, like overly complicated, so much so that you're not sure that your opinions are valid, it's not your fault. It's been presented as overly complicated for a very long time. It's not a conspiracy, exactly. There are some legitimate complications at the heart of the conflict. But as things got [00:52:00] less and less complicated over long periods of time, those who have an ideological interest in propping up their own side's narrative continued to go back to the old "It's complicated" talking point, because it worked to tamp down uncomfortable questions that they didn't want asked. People feel intimidated by feeling that they don't know enough, so they just shut up.
Some, who continue to beat the "it's complicated" drum, may be cynical about this and know that they're lying, but I'd guess that the vast majority of staunch supporters of Israel who defend against, or simply wave away, legitimate accusations of war crimes, human rights abuses, up to and including genocide and ethnic cleansing, truly believe themselves to be right to fall back on the idea that it's simply too complicated for those accusations to be accurate.
But in reality, even when you factor in all of the complications of history and context of the [00:53:00] land, the people, and the conflict, you get down to the very core of it, and as Ta-Nehisi Coates recognized when he visited the area in recent years, it's just not as complicated as we've been led to believe.
Before the recent war, it was already a system similar to Jim Crow America or Apartheid South Africa, where people had different rights based on their ethnicity and religion.
There is no context in which that is a legitimate way to run a society. Not because Jews don't have a well-earned fear that they may be targeted as a group, but because escaping the evils of an ethnostate in Europe only to form your own ethnostate puts you on the same path that leads to similar evil ends. Ethnostate is always the wrong answer, even if the question of how to keep a group of people safe is a reasonable one.
You don't need a PhD in Middle East studies to have a legitimate opinion on the wildly unbalanced [00:54:00] power dynamics between Israel and Palestine, or how those power dynamics, coupled with the anti-Arab racism endemic in the US that helps propel our unflinching support for a far-right maniac like Netanyahu and his government, are being used to pursue ethnic cleansing. And to understand that ethnic cleansing is wrong, just in case that needs to be spelled out for some.
What's really complicated is not whether or not it should be considered okay for Israel to commit crimes against humanity, just because some in power feel strongly that they should be allowed to. What's complicated, and more necessary to understand, is the psychological element of why a people born into a post-Holocaust world would gravitate toward a series of choices that would lead them from collective victim to perpetrator.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Israel and Palestine don't need military [00:55:00] support and shipments of weapons; they all need therapists if there's going to be any progress toward peace without extermination.
SECTION A: TRUMP’S GAZA PROPOSAL
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: and now, we'll continue to dive deeper on five topics today. Next up, section A, Trump's Gaza proposal, followed by section B, Afrikaners and Trump, Section C, West Bank Violence, Section D, Historical Context, and Section E, Resistance.
‘American imperialism’- Trump says ‘we’ll own’ Gaza, using terms 'like a real estate developer’ - The ReidOut - Air Date 2-4-25
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: There are days and nights in this business when you have to leave open the possibility that you can still be surprised. I might even say stunned. I think this is one of those days. Donald Trump making news in the biggest possible way. I'm going to read you the quotes that I think are stunning to just about everyone who heard them today after a day of.
Calling for the people of Gaza who he numbered at 1.8 million to be relocated out of the Gaza Strip today, Donald Trump said the following about the Palestinian people. [00:56:00] They could instead occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony.
Instead of having to go back and do it again, the us the US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do it, and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. And be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site. and get rid of the destroyed buildings when he was pressed on whether or not he would be willing to use the military to accomplish the U.
S. Takeover of the Gaza Strip. He doubled down on that, said we will do what's necessary. We'll do what's necessary. If it's necessary, we'll do that. We're going to take over the peace and we're going to develop it. He referred to the Gaza Strip as the Riviera of the Middle East. He said that world people world people will live in Gaza, including Palestinians and anyone else, I suppose, that wants to live in this new real estate [00:57:00] development.
He proposed today. Um, this was stunning. And this came in a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his first trip to the United States since he was labeled a war criminal by the International Criminal Court with arrest warrants issue. This is one of the few countries where Prime Minister Netanyahu can travel because the United States does not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, which rendered a judgment to that genocide and apartheid had taken place inside of Israel.
Disregarding the war in Gaza. So this was their joint press conference following a bilateral meeting. A stunner, a stunner by any, uh, by any definition of the word. I'm joined now by Vaughn Hilliard, White House correspondent for NBC news and Alex Wagner, host of Alex Wagner tonight. Um, and also Trump world, Trump, Trump, Trump land.
It's where it's,
ALEX WAGNER - HOST, MSNBC: it's, it's a world. Yeah,
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: [00:58:00] Vaughn. I do want to go to you first because this is a stunner. I'm just assuming that there is a lot of reaction right now to what we just heard. Official reaction, please share. I mean,
VAUGHN HILLYARD: actually, I've been to a few people and there's just silence. I mean, let's be very clear outside of Jared Kushner making a passing remark, a seemingly passing remark back in March of Gaza having beautiful waterfront property.
We have not heard the words of candidate Donald Trump or President Trump suggest the takeover of a land where millions of people call home. The moving them out and the taking over and the ownership of the United States. And I think that what this represents, I think, cannot be overstated here. Back in the first Trump administration, there was some semblance of a, of a, of a governing structure in the Trump administration.
In 2020, with the help of Jared Kushner, they did put forward what they call the two state solution proposal, right? There was going to be a, a, two states, and yet there was going to have to have, uh, uh, have Israeli security forces overseeing the Palestinian state, uh, [00:59:00] Palestinian president Abbas completely rejected it.
Okay. But at least it was some sort of a plan or something that was put forward. This is not anything of a plan. This is a complete American imperialism, uh, at its roots, at its core. Donald Trump suggesting that, uh, uh, uh, this land in the Middle East would be better occupied and overseen by America, I, I just don't think we can really begin to even comprehend What we're hearing two weeks in from this administration in terms of, in terms of the role that the United States is supposed to play.
And even baby not Yahoo stood next to him and said, I think that the American president sees maybe a different plan than what I do. But this is, it's just remarkable. And I don't think the silence, he
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: seemed stunned as well. I will say that BB Net and Yahoo Prime Minister Netanyahu definitely also seemed a bit stunned and taken aback.
and attempted to respond to it. Donald Trump also said that he has taken no position on Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. That is also a dramatic change in position from the United States position. He [01:00:00] also acknowledged that Gaza has been crushed. He said it's been leveled. He's been, it's destroyed.
It's a demolition site. Um, BB Netanyahu, as he was describing the destruction of Gaza. That BB Netanyahu's president, Prime Minister Netanyahu's own military cause, he seemed to acknowledge that complete destruction, but his answer all day today has been permanent displacement or at least temporary until they're allowed to move back with the world people of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
This is actually stunning.
The ripple effects of Trump's plan to 'own' Gaza - Diane Rehm On My Mind - Air Date 2-13-25
DIANE REHM - HOST, ON MY MIND: What do you think the message, the overall message is that Donald Trump is trying to send to the Middle East countries in general?
AARON DAVID MILLER: I think, in general, it's, with the exception of Israel, in general, it's, if you want support from the United States, free riding is over.
You're gonna have to stand up in a way that you haven't stood up before. [01:01:00] Marco Rubio was quoted just yesterday, and he's going to the region, Secretary of State Rubio, going to the region, that this is a region, he said, where people talk, but they don't do. And that comment, I think, was directed. Toward the Arab world.
So you have a transactional president. You see it everywhere, right? In tariffs, you see it in his bid to buy Greenland, you see it in his efforts to, uh, get, uh, Panama to decrease the amount of tolls that U. S. shipping pays through going through the canal by threatening. That the Panamanians are handing the canal over to China in violation of the 1978 treaties everywhere.
And you're going to see it on Ukraine too. Yes. He's trying to strike a deal with Zelensky. Ukrainians would turn over access to the rare minerals that they contain their [01:02:00] deposits in exchange for whatever Trump is going to give them. There is no value component to his foreign policy. I would argue there's very little strategy.
Uh, and I think it, it reflects. What we now see, um, and what we now see is a man, in my judgment, unlike any other president in American history. I would include Richard Nixon in this category as well. Harry Truman, Diane once quipped that Nixon may have read the Constitution but he didn't understand it.
Donald Trump just wants to put the Constitution aside. He is incapable, I'll phrase it this way, of turning the M in me, upside down, so it becomes a W in we. We have never had a president whose ambitions, whose motives, whose prejudices and sensibilities have no broader reach [01:03:00] than beyond his own political interests, his self interest, his vanity.
But it is stunning the degree to which norms and institutions That have, with all its imperfections, Diane, that has guided the Republic through decades, now seem to be, they no longer matter.
DIANE REHM - HOST, ON MY MIND: You think that his instincts as a real estate developer are more at play here than his Knowledge, understanding of and behavior toward the interplay and the cooperation among various countries of the world.
It's as though he's saying, I want the Gulf of Mexico, I want the Panama Canal. [01:04:00] I want Canada. I want Greenland. It's an acquisitive, um, aspiration that seems to move him to talk about Gaza. I mean, he's talking about not foreign policy at all, but
AARON DAVID MILLER: acquisition. Yeah, it's a very, I've never heard quite expressed that way, but the acquisitive character, the need to acquire, um, you know, it's symptomatic to kind of putting his name, the Trump brand, on all of these buildings, beginning with Trump Tower.
I mean, yes, it's the opportunistic, transactional, acquisitive character of a real estate developer. But You know, the American Republic is not some plaything that is there for Donald Trump's amusement and enrichment. You know, [01:05:00] presidents have obligations and responsibilities to the Constitution, first and foremost.
But the Constitution doesn't figure. at all in his sensibilities. He comes from a world in which you give only if you get. He comes from a world in which you, if you're criticized and you are hit, you don't absorb, you don't understand. You hit back, and you hit back harder. I mean, Donald Trump was the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote since 2004.
His victory was only the third narrowest in terms of the, of the popular vote. So Does he have a mandate? It's not. It's really kind of irrelevant. He is doing and acting, you know, I think about what FDR said about the office of the presidency. It's a place for moral leadership. And I just,[01:06:00]
uh, it troubles me, to say the least.
Shelter urgently needed in Gaza, Israeli raids in occupied West Bank - Al Jazeera News Updates - Air Date 2-11-25
AL JAZEERA ANCHOR: Thousands of Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza are being met with new challenges. Their homes are destroyed, the tents they've been using for months through the wind and rain are now in many cases barely usable. And now There's more bad weather. Trucks and cars trying to pass through the Netserim Corridor are slowly navigating muddy roads because of overnight rain.
Aid agencies say the 200, 000 tents and 60, 000 mobile homes that are supposed to be delivered under the ceasefire agreement need to be urgently brought in. Hamas has accused Israel of violating the deal by restricting the flow of aid and shelter. In other developments, U. S. President Donald Trump has repeated his comments about taking over Gaza and says countries in the region could be allowed to develop parts of it.
DONALD TRUMP: I'm committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as [01:07:00] us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Uh, other people may do it through our auspices, but we're committed to owning it, taking it. And making sure that Hamas doesn't move back. There's nothing to move back into.
Well,
AL JAZEERA ANCHOR: Hamas has condemned Trump's proposal in a post on Telegram. Hamas official Izzat Al Rishk says Trump's statements are absurd and reflect a deep ignorance of Palestine in the region. Gaza, he says, is not a property that can be bought and sold. And it is an integral part of our occupied Palestinian land.
Dealing with the Palestinian issue with the mentality of a real estate dealer is a recipe for failure. He says Gaza belongs to its people and they will not leave it except to their cities and villages occupied in 1948. The Israeli military has continued its raids in the occupied West Bank, detaining two people on Monday.
Its forces [01:08:00] also set fire to a house in the town of Silat al Harithya, west of Jenin City, at dawn. The fire forced residents to flee. Several houses in the area have been destroyed in the past few weeks as Israeli troops step up their assault. Israeli forces stormed an area in Hebron and raided the home of a Palestinian prisoner who was released on Saturday as part of the latest exchange of captives and prisoners with Hamas.
Palestinian fighters battled Israeli forces near the house.
SECTION B: AFRIKANERS AND TRUMP
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B, Afrikaners and Trump.
Elon's African roots Part 2 - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-13-25
NOEL: JONNY STEINBERG [writer and senior lecturer at Yale]: Afrikaners are the descendants of the first white people who settled in South Africa. That dates from 1652. At the time, Holland was a great imperial power. About a century and a half later, when Holland was in trouble in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took over the Cape Colony, a whole lot of English speaking white people arrived. And it was the descendants who formed themselves into Afrikaner nationalists, into a nationalist project in the late 19th, early 20th century. And I [01:09:00] guess it was to stand up against the British and to suppress Black people. And that project saw its culmination in 1948, when the party of Afrikaner Nationalism, the National Party, came to power and instituted apartheid.
And what was it like? What was apartheid like?
JONNY: You know, apartheid is famously one of many brutal regimes in the 20th century.
<CLIP> APARTHEID: 20TH-CENTURY SLAVERY [1971]: The policy of apartheid, literally separateness, has been elevated by the government of South Africa from a mere theory of racial superiority to the law of the land.
<CLIP> AL JAZEERA:
Tania Page: For decades the National Party enforced racial segregation and violently repressed any dissent. Many died fighting it. Some famous, others forgotten by all but their families.
JONNY: Many millions of people were displaced from their homes. You know, in the political struggle against apartheid, many thousands of people were killed and detained. It was a long, bitter, bloody, difficult struggle for democracy, which miraculously [01:10:00] ended peacefully in a negotiated settlement in 1994.
NOEL: What happened in ‘94?
JONNY: Well, four years earlier, in 1990, the last president of apartheid, F. W. de Klerk, released Nelson Mandela…
<CLIP> SABC NEWS: There’s Mr. Mandela. Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa.
…unbanned his party, the ANC, and decided that apartheid would end by a negotiated settlement with the people who were once his enemy.
<CLIP> NELSON MANDELA FOUNDATION:
F.W. De Klerk: The eyes of the world are presently focused on all South Africans. All of us now have an opportunity and the responsibility to prove that we are capable of a peaceful process in creating a new South Africa.
JONNY: You know, a lot of people died in those four years. There was a lot of violence. It was a complicated process, but it was in the end a peaceful settlement that both sides agreed to, bringing in [01:11:00] democracy in April 1994.
<CLIP> CBS NEWS: More than 300 years of white domination ended for good with the swearing in of Nelson Mandela as this African nation's first Black president.
Nelson Mandela: “So help me God”
NOEL: So the Afrikaners went from having all of the power and from having this system, apartheid, that basically kept them in power. After the negotiated settlement, what happened to this group?
JONNY: It was a pretty gentle settlement on white people. Afrikaans people were about just over half of the white population. Most people carried on living their lives pretty much as they were before, to be honest.
NOEL: Hm.
JONNY: You know, that's a simple version of the story. When you scratch underneath, more complicated things are happening.
SCORING IN <Dibombe - APM>
One of the things happening is that crime rates absolutely soared in the late apartheid and early post apartheid era. And white people became victims of crimes in ways that they didn't know under apartheid, which was very frightening. I mean, another thing happening – and, and this is about the land, this is not about all white people or all Afrikaans people -- but is about [01:12:00] farmers. A policy of land redress was introduced in the mid 1990s. And to explain what happened, it's necessary to go back to 1913 when a law was passed disallowing Black ownership of land in South Africa. Many, many people displaced from their land in the decades after that. By the early 1970s, several million people had been displaced from their land. And a policy of redress was set in place in the mid 1990s and, among other things, it allowed people who could show that they had had their land taken away from them after 1913 to get it back. But not by confiscating land, not by taking it away from those who owned it, but by buying it back at market prices. So that was the core of the land reform scheme, just stated at its most simple.
SCORING OUT
NOEL: So in the mid 1990s, there's this process of land reform, and it's now 30 years later. Is that process still underway?
JONNY: It is [01:13:00] underway and, you know, I think many white people's grievances about that process are, are less about the policies themselves and the way that they've been implemented. Black and white South Africans are both enormously, enormously frustrated with South Africa's government for its levels of inefficiency and its corruption. And very often anger at, at that, melds with anger over the substance and the content of policy. You know, a fair amount of land has been redistributed. It has not been a particularly successful or a particularly well managed process. It has left both poor Black people and white landholders and others dissatisfied. So a lot has to do with the corruption and inefficiencies of the process itself.
NOEL: President Trump doesn't always speak with a great deal of accuracy. When he talks about South Africa now, as he has been doing recently, he will say things like “the land of white South Africans is being stolen.” Is this an idea that Donald Trump just came up with himself, or is this idea prevalent in South Africa also?
JONNY: Well, if you look at South Africans' response to Donald Trump saying [01:14:00] that, nobody has agreed with him.
NOEL: Huh!
JONNY: You know, land has not been stolen from anybody in South Africa since 1994. A lot of land has been bought at market prices and redistributed but not stolen. As for where these ideas come from, there have been South African organizations that have lobbied Trump very, very, vocally, very persistently, for a number of years on matters of land redistribution, but also on matters of crime, of the extent to which people who live in rural South Africa are vulnerable. And many white farmers have been victims of very violent crime. And Trump has heard about all of that from a very vocal, very articulate lobby that says that violent crime against farmers is not coincidental, that it's organized, that there's something behind it. It's an attempt to push them off the land. He has been told that by pretty extreme forces in South African society, not mainstream ones.
NOEL: Could you dig in a bit more on violence against white farmers. What does that mean, what does that look like?
JONNY: So farmers [01:15:00] generally live in remote areas. They're far from rapid response. They're far from police. There are a lot of guns in South Africa. There's a lot of unemployed young men in South Africa, a lot of people making a living from crime. You know, people enter a remote property and hold up the people at gunpoints to take their possessions, sometimes kill them. Sometimes there's a terrible level of brutality in South African predatory crime.
<CLIP> ABC:
Jo-An Engelbrecht: In the last 10, 20 years in this area I can name 20, 30 attacks, murders on farmers.
<CLIP> AFP:
Hans Bergmann: We were busy having breakfast and they just walk around with a shotgun, two pistols and a stick, and they said “we are going to kill you today.”
<CLIP> ABC:
Golden Mtika: Some of them, they have that past ideology of saying, you know, “the farmers took our land for free” and when they go there they take out the anger on them.
Jonathan Holmes: So you think there is a racial…
Golden Mtika: Yes. There is that racial element in it as well.
JONNY: [01:16:00] Levels of violence in South Africa are extreme. You know, in a country of 62, 63 million people, there are 20,000 murders a year. That is breathtaking. It's a violent place. And it's absolutely understandable and natural that, you know, the white farming community would feel under siege, would feel vulnerable, would feel scared. But it's another thing to say that there's an organized plot against them, that this is a manifestation of a deeper attempt to throw them off their land. You know, if you look at who is killed in South Africa, if you look at per capita murder rates, those most vulnerable to being killed are unemployed young Black men. And that's not for a moment to say that white farmers should not feel afraid and should not take action to defend themselves. But the idea that they're especially victimized is untenable.
NOEL: Hmm. And so, responding to this, President Trump has made this offer to help resettle Afrikaners in the United States. Have any of them said, yeah, we'd like to go? What's the response there?
JONNY: <chuckles> [01:17:00] People are pretty bewildered by the offer, you know, including the people who've been lobbying Trump. Nobody has taken him up on it. The head of Agri South Africa – it’s a pretty mainstream, perhaps a center-right organization – said, we're farming here and we're farming successfully.
Trumps South Africa Fixation Part 2 - What Next - Air Date 2-12-25
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: At the center of this back and forth between the Trump administration and South Africa is a law called the Expropriation Act. It was enacted last month, and in very rare cases, it allows the government to take land without compensating the owner.
CHRIS MCGREAL: In fact, the law actually promotes a just and equitable compensation and then permits expropriation in very narrow exceptional circumstances such as the land has been abandoned.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: The Guardian's Chris McGreal told me that misinformation around this law is largely being driven by Afrikaner organizations. Afrikaners are white South Africans who are mostly descended from the Dutch people who colonized this place.
CHRIS MCGREAL: So the central claim being made by Afrikaner [01:18:00] groups and those who promote the idea of a white genocide in South Africa is that the post Apartheid political dispensation is essentially a racial conspiracy against the white minority.
That the whites have gone from being the oppressors to the victims. And there are a couple of things at work here. One of which is post apartheid laws to try and readjust the balance. So to give you an example, Whites make up just 7 percent of the population of South Africa, but they still own more than 70 percent of the land.
And that goes back to colonial era law in 1913, the Land Act, but also apartheid era laws. And part of the, you know, existing policy and laws is to try and redress that balance. And you have broader American will recognize this broader affirmative action programs to promote, you know, black educational education for people who were previously disadvantaged under apartheid, which [01:19:00] is people of mixed race origin, black people, uh, people of Indian and Chinese descent, all of those who were discriminated against.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: It's interesting. You're saying there are all these laws to kind of make things more equitable, but at the same time, you're also saying that A very small percentage of South Africa is made up of white people and a very large amount of the land is owned by them. So while these laws exist, it doesn't sound like a whole lot of people are having their land taken away.
CHRIS MCGREAL: No, and so what you see with these laws across the broad spectrum is that they've changed society in many ways. Uh, you know, black people have much better education and access to higher education, um, even though there's Also massive unemployment amongst blacks. Um, but land is one area where there has been little change.
And, you know, more than 30 years after the end of apartheid, it's, uh, it's a particularly sore area for a lot of people [01:20:00] because the vast majority of the population, black population, is rural and poor and they see the land still in the hands of whites. So, no, it's become a symbol of, of In many ways, what hasn't changed in South Africa and how whites continue to dominate the economy in so many ways.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: So are Afrikaners actually under threat in South Africa?
CHRIS MCGREAL: No, I think that what they've lost their advantage that they had under apartheid and what you're seeing is that there's an attempt, particularly by Afrikaners, to rewrite history and make out that they are the victims of all of this. So for instance, a few years ago, there was a very popular song called Dela Rey, which is about a general from the Boer War.
MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: For those who don't know about the Boer War, just give me one sentence.
CHRIS MCGREAL: It was essentially that the British sent their armies to conquer these, these two, uh, white republics and, and essentially took their land, took their gold. And after that, the, the [01:21:00] Afrikaners were very much, uh, second class citizens under colonial rule.
Of course, black people were very much third, fourth and fifth class citizens. In that war, there was a A General De La Rey, who fights to the end, even though he knows he's going to lose. And there was a song came out a few years ago, and Afrikaners adopted this song. They were singing it at rugby matches and in bars.
And it was very much portraying themselves again as victims, bypassing apartheid, bypassing all the advantages they'd had, and turning themselves from the oppressor into the victim. And that's how now many of them see themselves as they are, again, the victims in South Africa, even though they've had all the advantages of those many years of apartheid.
South Africa's response to US threats - Focus on Africa - Air Date 2-7-25
CHARLES GITONGA - PRESENTER, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Many people may or may not know that Elon Musk is South African born, but he's tweeted about the South African government before. And in particular, this tweet in [01:22:00] 2023, where he said that. He had heard calls of a genocide of white people and he was referring to the killing of white farmers, which became a flashpoint in South Africa, but now he has the ear of the president, the support of the president.
How can this play out against South Africa?
VERASHNI PILLAY: Indeed, there's a long history of South Africa's race relations being used and sort of leveraged within America, and particularly within Trump's space. Back when Trump was president in 2016, a local group called AfriForum, who tries to perpetuate what is It's really absolutely a myth that white people are being targeted more than any other racial group when it comes to murder and crimes.
They've tried to put out this myth of farm killings. They were quite successful in getting Trump's administration to take that quite seriously back in 2016. Now, as you've pointed out, Elon Musk separately to all of this has also been very vocal about the same issue. Ironically, as a white person who grew up in South Africa and left the country in his teens and who should know [01:23:00] better that there is no white genocide happening off South Africans, but it has become.
A sort of rallying cry for the right across the world. We've seen a conservative Australian prime minister say the same kind of thing previously. And it's sort of a dog whistle to a certain kind of voter to say we will take care of white interests. The fact is that it is very detrimental and it is very false.
What we've seen happen now is all of that just come to a boiling point with Musk now, as you're saying, having the ear of President Donald Trump and also having his own agenda of taking on some of South Africa's laws around ownership. Musk has been wanting to spread his Starlink internet network across the world and South Africa has sort of resisted saying, you know, we have certain laws around local ownership of international businesses.
And Musk has tweeted saying that, um, South Africa has openly racist ownership laws. And many people have speculated that this might be linked to his business interests. So you see all of that coalescing into this. all out attack on South Africa's race relations, including this [01:24:00] misinformation that there's a white genocide happening, that white farmers are being killed, when none of the stats really support that kind of narrative.
It is true that murder is a huge problem in South Africa. It is true that farmers are often targeted, but there's nothing to suggest that white people are targeted more than any other race group.
CHARLES GITONGA - PRESENTER, FOCUS ON AFRICA: So on Thursday, we saw the U. S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, accusing South Africa of what he called anti Americanism, and he actually refused to attend the G20 meeting in Johannesburg that's happening later this month.
I'm just wondering whether America wasn't convinced by the latest explanations by the South African president about specifically, let's say, the Land Expropriation Act, for example, and even the call that they had with Elon Musk. Were they not convinced, or is there more to this than what we are seeing now?
VERASHNI PILLAY: There's a lot of different priorities in this particular administration. So Musk might be talking to Ramaphosa and might be having talked down from his particular high perch at this point, but he's not exactly an elected official, [01:25:00] right? So maybe he hasn't spoken to Marco Rubio. We don't actually know what we do know is that this administration has.
come out of the starting blocks in a fashion of just shock and awe. It's just, you know, we're going to take over Greenland. We're going to take over Gaza. We're putting terrorists on China and Canada. There is so much happening so fast that it is hard for anyone to keep track. And I wonder if anybody within the administration itself is keeping track of how rapidly things are moving and all the kind of.
Really extreme positions that this administration is taking outside of the democratic norm. So you saw Secretary Marco Rubio coming out and saying he's not going to attend the G20 summit that is scheduled to take place in Johannesburg later this year. And he did list the land reform bill, which by the way, has nothing to do with land grabs is very similar to other countries policies around land.
He came out saying that that's the reason that he wouldn't want to come. But he also said the reason he didn't want to come is because, uh, South Africa is using G20 to promote solidarity, equality, and sustainability. And everyone around the world is going, what, what is wrong with solidarity, equality, and sustainability?
So in a sense, The land issue might be one [01:26:00] issue, but really, um, as he said in his tweet, his job is to advance America's national interests, not waste taxpayer money. This is his way to signal to his constituency that they are not going to take part in any sort of bilateral agreements or international.
Forums where countries come together to try to find solutions. I mean, you see that they've withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement from the WHO, from all kinds of things. So as, uh, Marco Rubio saying, you know what, we're boycotting G20. It's not because South Africa is doing anything particularly bad.
It's in keeping with a general kind of trend of saying we're, we're an America first administration we're withdrawing. It's about us. We're not going to take part in world affairs unless we're taking over countries like Greenland and territories like Greenland and Gaza. Right. But, um. I don't necessarily think it will fix polio in South Africa because it isn't keeping with what they're doing with other international bodies.
CHARLES GITONGA - PRESENTER, FOCUS ON AFRICA: But the relations that South Africa keeps with Russia and China and Iran seem to make the U. S. very uncomfortable. As you know, this legal challenge against [01:27:00] Israel at the International Court of Justice regarding Gaza is one of those very uncomfortable things that America seems to, they look at it in that.
So how can South Africa navigate this, especially with this new administration of Trump?
VERASHNI PILLAY: You know, absolutely. This is not just about land reform or America's current attitude towards the rest of the world. There are many different threads in South Africa and US' relationship, and one thing that is going to be a sticking point is South Africa sort of taking on a lot of the Western world in terms of its stance.
And Gaza going to the international criminal court arguing for. The genocide to stop against Palestinians. And a lot of that is going to cause some nations to be very uncomfortable, but it is a stance that many of us are proud of, but it is something that is going to definitely play a role in international relations.
The fact is it is a stance that the South Africa is not going to back down on, especially under the current government of the ANC, it is a stance that South Africa is not going to easy step away from. They're going to keep campaigning for this particular issue, as it is very close to the country's heart, [01:28:00] given our history of apartheid, um, the other issues that Absolutely true that South Africa is not playing the game as many Western democracies would like us to play it.
There is the sort of uncomfortable closeness with countries like Russia, countries like China that just shows how South Africa is caught between these different loyalties. On one hand, we want to be seen as a democracy that honors international norms. On the other hand, we're trying to build alliances outside of the dominance of the Western world to kind of show up our security, but that also.
creates the challenge that we are allowing ourselves with non democratic governments and governments that pose a problem to the Western world. So it is a very tricky tightrope to walk. On one hand, South Africa cannot ignore the fact that we need to build alliances like BRICS in order to counterbalance the outsize influence that the West and the developed world has on our Uh, kind of economic reality and our political reality.
We have to build those counterbalance bodies, but on the other hand, in doing so, like you say, we're going to align ourselves to, um, some, you know, Arab countries, some Eastern countries [01:29:00] that have questionable rights. And that is a very delicate tightrope to walk indeed.
Trumps Insane Plan To Own Gaza Part 2 - Pod Save the World - Air Date 2-12-25
TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Um, Ben, I did want to just note that when, uh, Trump was asked If refugees from Gaza could come to the U. S., he said, no, Gaza's 5, 000 miles away. It's inconvenient. They'd rather settle in the region. But when white South African refugees who live on the other side of the planet, like literally, are apparently welcome in the U.
S., you know, one might wonder why they're treating so differently.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yeah, this is actually a really important story to get at the heart of. What this whole MAGA thing is all about, because it's obviously got a deeply racial component. Um, I mean, to build on your gods analogy, Tommy, when, you know, a country in which there was apartheid and, and just brutal systemic repression, and 70 percent of land is owned by white farmers who make up 7 percent of the population.
When a portion of that land that is [01:30:00] nobody's living on is reallocated. That's a. White genocide. But when you blow up all of Gaza and destroy all of it and ethnically cleanse it, it's called like a redevelopment program or something, you know? Um, so they applied their own, you know, feelings about South African white people to Gaza.
Uh, imagine what that would look like. I think just to add, you know, something to this, in addition to the Elon Musk of it all, like how much is this white South African, you know, calling the shots as you point out Trump. I think that this is also Trump is trying to kind of with the people around him, recreate the history of the last, let's say, post Cold War era, the last 35 years.
So for people like you and me, you know, older millennials, um, the high point of moral, um, Achievement in the world was Nelson [01:31:00] Mandela becoming the president of South Africa and and they're literally trying to reverse engineer that and say, No, no, no. Actually, the white people in South Africa were actually the victims.
And it's a mirror image of what they've done in this country. Like white people have somehow been the victims of racism. And I think that the true believers, the Stephen Miller types, they actually believe this. And if you look at what authoritarian regimes do, they do try to kind of recreate history itself.
And I think that the true believers, the Stephen Miller types, they actually believe this. And if you look at what authoritarian regimes do, they try to recreate history itself. And, and so I think they want to undo the entire liberal consensus around. What was good, you know, there was a good thing that apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela came out of prison and became president of South Africa, like they'll probably be pulling like Invictus off of shelves, you know, like, like, we can't watch that Nate Damon movie anymore, you know, but I know I'm making light of it, but it's a serious point, like they're, they're hyper focused in the same way that People on the left and liberals have focused on South Africa as a morality [01:32:00] play in a good way.
They're trying to reverse that from their own perspective, and it's super dark.
SECTION C: WEST BANK VIOLENCE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached section C, West Bank violence.
Trumps Nightmare Plan for Gaza - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 1-31-25
JORDAN UHL - CO-HOST, THE INTERCEPT BRIEFING: To start, Akayla, would you remind us What are the terms of the ceasefire deal?
JESSICA WASHINGTON - CO-HOST, THE INTERCEPT BRIEFING: So the ceasefire was officially announced on January 15th, and it went into effect four days later on the 19th. It is supposed to take place in three distinct stages, the first of which includes a complete ceasefire, which means an agreement to halt fighting. But there's a huge caveat here that does not mean that the war is over.
And some experts are doubtful that it will hold. They expect Israel to do what it has done in other historical cases with respect to Palestinian territories, which is to create a pretext for resuming hostilities and to claim that, or to claim that Hamas has, has done so, and start [01:33:00] bombing or re instate the siege.
Also part of stage one is that Israel will release just under 2, 000 Palestinian prisoners. leave populated areas in Israel, but Israeli troops will stay in the border areas in Gaza. Hamas will also release 33 hostages in interval stages, and aid will start to be allowed into Gaza. The second stage of the ceasefire includes a permanent ceasefire, which is different from the complete ceasefire in the first stage in that it's a stoppage of war.
and an agreement to some form of mediation, um, which includes the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the remaining hostages in Gaza will be exchanged for more Palestinian prisoners. And then the final and probably most important part of the ceasefire stages is the third stage which includes the return of the bodies of dead hostages and the reconstruction, the beginning of the reconstruction of Gaza.
I just want to back up there and break down [01:34:00] what the reconstruction of Gaza actually entails and some of the limitations. Close to 70 percent of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Experts say that just clearing the rubble from the 15 months of the siege could take more than 20 years.
So we're talking about decades here. Israel completely destroyed Gaza's hospital system. Students have no access to education. Humanitarian agencies say there's no Safe place in the Gaza Strip for children to learn another big issue with the reconstruction is that one of the largest aid providers in Gaza is banned starting on Thursday under this new Israeli law, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, also known as UNRWA.
U. N. R. W. A. Uh, will be expelled from the territory. This group has provided the bulk of humanitarian aid over the last 15 months. More than two thirds of all food aid. They've sheltered more than a million [01:35:00] people. They stepped into vaccine vaccinate Children when the polio outbreak started as a result of Israeli attacks, and they also in provide really important mental health and psychosocial services for adults and children who've been traumatized by this war.
So that is the context in which all of this is happening. We just put up a story this week on the UNRWA ban and the logistics of reconstruction, which we can get into more.
JORDAN UHL - CO-HOST, THE INTERCEPT BRIEFING: Yes, definitely want to get into that. But first, Jonah, I want to bring you in here. On his first day, Trump issued a slew of executive orders, including one that lifted Biden era sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
First, tell us about the sanctions Biden ordered, and then what has happened since Trump lifted them.
JONAH VALDEZ - REPORTER, THE INTERCEPT: Yeah, thanks for mentioning that, Jordan. For this one, let's go back to last February. Israel was at its peak of activity in its genocidal war in Gaza, but alongside that, in the West Bank, [01:36:00] Israeli settlers were regularly attacking Palestinian civilians, forcing them off their land, doing things like burning farms, olive groves, oftentimes injuring or killing Palestinians.
And the Biden administration, which at the time was under pressure from a growing anti war, pro ceasefire, pro Palestinian movement, Biden responded by issuing sanctions on certain individuals and groups who were carrying out this violence, mostly Israeli religious extremists. And what this means is these individuals had their U.
S. held assets frozen, which limits their ability to fund their settler violence against Palestinians. And fast forward to this past few weeks, on day one of his second term, Trump went out of his way to lift those sanctions. And literally within hours, what we see is a surge in Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians.
Resuming attacks on villages, setting buildings and cars on fire, injuring dozens. And then the next day, the Israeli government [01:37:00] launches a new invasion into the West Bank, which on its first day killed at least 10 Palestinians and experts are, we're quick to note that Biden's sanctions did little to stop settler violence in the West Bank.
Anyway, 2024 was a record setting year of settler violence on Palestinians, but they still saw it as a start. Uh, something to build on toward actually getting to the root of the problem, which is material support from the Israeli government itself. And with Trump lifting those sanctions, Israel is getting pretty much another pass to continue its violent land grabs from Palestinians.
Trump
JORDAN UHL - CO-HOST, THE INTERCEPT BRIEFING: also rescinded a policy that had blocked sanctions against the International Criminal Court. Could you tell us about that?
JONAH VALDEZ - REPORTER, THE INTERCEPT: Sure, yeah. This one, it's a little confusing, and really we could call it sort of a war of executive orders. Trump issued one, then Biden issued one, and now Trump again. So, to [01:38:00] understand the orders, we Gotta go back to 2020.
It's the final year of Trump's term. Uh, the U. S. at the time was withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the International Criminal Court, or the ICC at The Hague, was starting to investigate for possible war crimes committed by both the Taliban, but also U. S. soldiers. They focused on things like torture. And around the same time, the ICC was also investigating Israel for its own potential war crimes stemming from its war in Gaza, but in 2014.
And in that war, uh, the Israeli military killed more than 2, 300 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. And the ICC was also investigating possible war crimes committed by Israel. In the West Bank. So at that moment, it's 2020. The International Criminal Court is super active trying to hold people's feet to the fire.
And Trump and his administration were worried the ICC would go even further after senior U. S. military officials [01:39:00] and also senior officials in Israel. So basically in an attempt to avoid accountability, Trump issued an executive order that gave the government power to sanction the ICC officials and prosecutors who are investigating U.
S. personnel or those of its allies. And we saw that government, uh, the government used those sanctions several months later. And that means, again, freezing people's U. S. held assets and limiting travel to the U. S., revoking their visas. So fast forward to 2021, Biden is in office and he issues another executive order that blocks Trump's 2020 order.
This lifts sanctions against the ICC officials. And now back here on day one of Trump's second term, he issues, you guessed it, another executive order to rescind Biden's executive order, which blocked the sanctions. Even though this doesn't mean that Trump's original 2020 order suddenly springs back into effect, it still leaves the door wide open for Trump to go after [01:40:00] the court again, something that members of Congress are also trying to do.
And remember the ICC has two active arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant for their alleged war crimes.
Israels Ever-Expanding War on the West Bank - On the Nose - Air Date 2-5-25
AZMAT KHAN: So I think we've certainly seen since the 7th of October, 2023 trends that were already persistent in the West Bank over 2021, up until that moment of 7th of October 2023, definitely accelerate after that, not just in the way of Israeli search and arrest operations, but also settler violence.
And at that point, you know, we'd seen the obfuscation of the demarcations between settler and soldier, whereby you had Settlers that were now donning military uniforms, thereby making a lot of these incursions even more fatal and even more destructive in a lot of Palestinian localities. And where prior to the seventh, you saw a lot of Israeli operations were very much clustered in the north, which is where a lot of these perpetrators that were alleged to have conducted lone wolf attacks in Israel.
as the [01:41:00] justification for Israel conducting its search and arrest operations in the West Bank, often hailed from. I think this was the first time where we really saw Israel really indiscriminately just going north, south, central. I mean, even places like the PA administrative capital hasn't been immune to deadly Israeli search and arrest operations, where we've also seen fatalities and destruction.
Over the last 15 months, we've also seen very similar images. That we've seen in places like Gaza coming outta the West Bank in places like Ulka and places like Tobar, places like Janine, where quite literally entire neighborhoods have been raised to the ground and where we've seen forcible displacement and in many cases, just from the sheer scale of destruction and destruction to routinized daily life, where now seeing also associated displacement, and that is actually taking effect not just in the north, but also in the south.
In the center of the West Bank, places like Ramallah, for instance, where the routinization of daily life has been completely disrupted and where there is really no sense of security for Palestinians.
TAHANI MUSTAFA: One particular area in which we've seen Israeli forces [01:42:00] ramp up the war in the West Bank has been through the use of airstrikes.
There were reports in 2022 of drone strikes that the Israeli army didn't confirm. And in 2023, there were reports of strikes they did. And after October 7th, those escalated significantly. We've seen some 60 or more deadly airstrikes across the West Bank that have killed people since October 7th. They have launched some of their largest raids.
Over the summer, the IDF came into multiple camps in the northern areas, including Junin, but also Jokaran. Balata and Farah camp in the north, where they launched these intense raids that coupled not only soldiers on the ground in these areas, going after what they said were fighters, but also conducting drone strikes and airstrikes with fighter jets.
There was an airstrike in Tilkarim that hit a cafe on October 3rd that killed. 18 people, [01:43:00] some of them children, and that was not a drone. That was an Israeli fighter jet. And I went right after it happened and collected the weapons fragments and was able to identify them as US weapons from a JDAM. And these are not normal tactics in a place like the West Bank, but with so much attention focused on Gaza, it has been incredibly easy to overlook that escalation.
ALEX KANE - SENIOR REPORTER, ON THE NEWS: I really want to dig into this question of aerial warfare. I mean, Obviously, during the Second Intifada, for instance, airstrikes were really common. And then, I mean, I don't know for how many years, but then there was a period in which airstrikes didn't happen. And yet, as you mentioned, perhaps beginning in 2022, and obviously significantly since October 7th, there's been an escalation in airstrikes.
And I'm not sure if people reading the news might. Sort of understand the significance. Like why should we focus on airstrikes? You know, what makes aerial warfare sort of different than the kinds of on the ground [01:44:00] military raids that we've always seen and why is it important to take stock of this aerial warfare in particular,
TAHANI MUSTAFA: Israel has long claimed that.
They only conduct drone strikes in places where they can't make arrests. I've been to the sites of about 25 or so deadly airstrikes across the West Bank, and routinely it was very hard to understand why these particular targets necessitated airstrikes. I think that there is a question of risk to soldiers that, you know, they might be entertaining.
where there are Israeli soldiers on the ground while there are also airstrikes happening. I mean, these are residential areas where there's very densely populated Palestinians living in these camps, just house by house by house, connected to one another. So to conduct these strikes and to expect to be precise whether that's a drone is really just hard to understand.
And you can really see the impact it's having on families. I went to the site of a Christmas Eve strike that [01:45:00] occurred in Tilkarim. And. Two women were killed, you know, as far as I can tell, no militants were killed in that particular strike. There may have been militants nearby. Two women were killed and the husband of one of the women, her name was Baraa, but Baraa's husband told me that In the weeks prior to that, she had written a will about what she wanted for her family and what she wanted for her daughter and how she wanted her daughter to be raised, simply because she was anticipating her own death.
In that area, uh, that particular neighborhood, there had been a barrage of strikes and she lived with fear that she might be killed. And there were many civilians killed. In that neighborhood and in those areas and the months prior and so just imagine what your mentality might have to be to think that.
This is something that might reach you or impact you and they didn't have, you know, as her family told me, they didn't have anywhere else to go. You know, the Israeli army is often trying to evacuate [01:46:00] civilians and the populations of these camps and so many of them would tell me things like we had no other place to go.
They are quite poor, you know, living in the camps where they might have a home is a lot cheaper than trying to afford rent in major cities that where these camps are located near. And so often they are in these areas where these very intense military operations are taking place with airstrikes. And they're really caught in the crosshairs in ways that we have not previously seen.
AZMAT KHAN: Yeah. I mean, I think it definitely serves a military objective for Israel, which is maximum impact at the lowest possible cost for its soldiers. And that's exactly what these airstrikes do. We've also seen, and I think this was prior to the 7th of October, which is what many that had been following some of Israel's.
security operations in the West Bank were warning of, which is Israel doesn't have soldiers capable of actually conducting effective insurgency campaigns. And we'd seen that in a lot of these localities where they were going in over the last two years prior to that, trying to target armed groups, trying to target the problem of militancy that was growing across the [01:47:00] Northern West Bank.
And where you were literally seeing, I mean, you know, they were having to deploy some of their most special units, highly trained soldiers, again, something like four to five. Kids, effectively kids 18 to 22 year olds in places like the old city of Nablus. It's densely populated, incredibly congested, and I mean, the level of force that they had to deploy in order just to target those five kids was immense, and imagine those five kids being able to engage in a five hour shootout with Israel's special forces.
It was insane. And that's when you started to see Israel then having to deploy its air force, right? In places like Jenin, back in July, 2023, we only really saw Israel then having to deploy its air force in order to rescue its ground troops. Again, it's, it's a serious miscalculation of just how well trained its soldiers are.
And that was something that even military commentators were talking about in terms of the conduct of soldiers in trying to fight an insurgency campaign in a place like Gaza. If Israel could barely contain battalions of something like [01:48:00] 50 to 83 young men who had really no serious combat experience, then how were they meant to fare in a place like Gaza?
And I think that's been very much proven, especially in the case like Janine. I mean, even today, if we look at Janine now, the brigade don't total more than 83 in terms of young militants. Again, their combat experience very limited. And yet that camp has been under siege from both the PA that had to deploy a thousand Palestinian security forces and now the Israeli military, and still they don't have The issue of armed resistance under control.
I mean, we're just talking about over the last two months, nevermind the fact that Israel has been dealing with this since 2021.
TAHANI MUSTAFA: Yeah, I might add, you know, it certainly questions the capability of them to fight on the ground, but also just about their intelligence. Repeatedly, there have been cases in which they have assessed, you know, a particular threat.
So, for example, in Timun on January 8th, they conducted an airstrike near where IDF troops were operating. and called it a terrorist cell. I went to the site the [01:49:00] next day and it was essentially an eight year old boy, a 10 year old boy, and a 24 year old, they were all cousins, who had been playing outside together and they had called this a terrorist cell.
They took the bodies and only, I think, later on that night did they return them and admit, you know, this was not the terrorist cell that they had initially described it as. And I went there and essentially This family awoke to the sounds of the strike, came outside, saw the bodies, a young woman named Isra, who is the sister of Adam, who was the 24 year old who was killed, said she could see Hamza, the 8 year old boy, still breathing, and immediately Israeli soldiers rushed in and prevented them from Seeking medical care, which is something I've heard again and again and again, is that after a lot of these deadly operations, you know, ambulances were either obstructed in one case, a medical worker was shot while he was trying to resuscitate someone [01:50:00] and Essentially, they watched their loved ones die right before them.
There are certainly cases in which they went after specific fighters. There are cases where they have killed who they anticipated. But over and over, I found cases where they either killed only civilians, Missed their target or they're really dubious questions as to what kind of intelligence they were operating under.
And I think that really plays a role in understanding not only the failures of October 7th, like Tahani said, their ability to conduct warfare against insurgency.
American Jews, Israel, and Palestine w Peter Beinart Part 2 - American Prestige - Air Date 2-11-25
DEREK DAVISON - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: How much, uh, power, I guess, uh, or not, not power necessarily, but how much do, do, uh, American Jews load onto settlers as this kind of boogeyman that represent, who represent everything?
Uh, too, too far, too extreme. These are the people that you can blame for, um, you know, the, the trouble, the, the mobs in the West [01:51:00] Bank or the people who want to march into Gaza and, and bring settlements back there. It feels like for a lot of people, the settlement movement becomes this convenient thing to point at and say, well, look, I'm not like those people, even though, even as, as you say.
you know, this little movement toward anything that would actually bring about the, you know, the two state solution or rights for Palestinians or a little concern about that, uh, when challenged on it, it's always like, well, I'm not like the, the Ben Gviers. I'm not like Smotric. I'm not like those guys.
PETER BEINART: Yeah. I think it's, I think, I think it's a good point. I think, first of all, it's partly because a lot of Israeli Jews who are kind of in the political center and a lot of American Jews. have a kind of cultural antipathy towards what they think of as religious extremists or religious fundamentalists. So part of this is a kind of an inter Jewish culture war which has to do with religion and, and, and secularism, right?
And so that, and so there's a tendency to say they are extremists and they're, they're, they're brutal because they are these [01:52:00] religious fanatics and we are modern, you know, enlightened people. But, you know, the truth is that, you know, Ben Gavir and Smotrich have still never expelled nearly as many Palestinians as, like, a young Yitzhak Rabin did in 1948, you know, under the leadership of David Ben Gurion, and these were settler, kind of kibbutznik, socialist Israelis, right?
So there's a, there's a long tradition here of expelling Palestinians and denying Palestinians basic rights. Israel from 1948 to 1966 when the Likud party was, had no shot at power when it was completely dominated by labor, socialist, secular Zionists held Palestinians under military law for, from 1940.
So this is, this is a deep part of the tradition, you know, secular among secular religious, you know, quote unquote, left and right Israelis. And so, and the, and the settler project is also, it's a project of the state, right? These are not. Independent actors. Now it's true, they can be a nuisance for the Israeli state sometimes, and sometimes they can, but, but in general, the only reason these settlements can exist in the West Bank is because [01:53:00] they are protected by the Israeli army and because the Israeli government has put huge amounts of money into maintaining this infrastructure, right?
Not to mention the fact that they are now very important. kind of almost backbone of some of the military units of the Israeli, of the Israeli defense forces.
DEREK DAVISON - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: And I think to bring it back to politics and bring it back to the Democratic Party, you see that reflected in the way that the Biden administration tried this token policy of sanctioning these extremist quote unquote extremist settlers without any, you know, appetite for going after the systematic.
institutional things that support the settlement movement. It was just sort of for show, it seemed like.
PETER BEINART: Yes, I think that's exactly right. And it was also a kind of way of saying, because we're not going to stop sending Israel the arms that are destroying Gaza, um, it's a kind of look over here. We're doing this thing here in the West Bank.
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: So just building off what you said about the history of Israel and how this sort of oppression is baked in. Do you think this, uh, [01:54:00] this was ultimately coming that this, this was, uh, overdetermined that some form of ethnic cleansing was inevitably going to happen barring the United States or another, uh, another basically supplier to a client saying, you can't do that.
I mean,
PETER BEINART: it does kind of look that way. I mean, in the sense it sure
DANIEL BESSNER - CO-HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: does kind of look that way, doesn't it?
PETER BEINART: I mean, I mean, I mean, obviously, I don't know. I mean, you, again, Because it's, because giving Palestinians equality, uh, and citizenship in Israel has never been on the table. Um, and because this process of, and because a Palestinian state has kind of also, that ship sailed quite a long time ago.
That in some ways it was probably, now we can think of it, the system of kind of management, Israel had this kind of management system. The Palestinian Authority is a subcontractor in the West Bank working with the IDF. And in a strange way, Hamas also becoming a kind of partner of Israel, right? In recent years with what Tariq Bokhani calls the violent equilibrium that you bomb sometimes, but also you [01:55:00] send messages to one another.
And Israel under Naftali Bennett, you know, they, they had this idea that, and even under Netanyahu. We're going to maybe let them have some aid, some money, the Qataris can give them some money so they won't totally starve and maybe even a few of them can come into work in Israel and we'll have this carrot and sticks and we'll manage that, right?
I think in retrospect we see that was inherently probably a very unstable kind of system and one that was, was weakening. And then you say that you have no external restraints on what Israel is doing. So what is Israel going to do as the management system starts to collapse most spectacularly and horrifyingly on October 7th?
And also, again, to, you know, You know, so you say, okay, well, what's our solution to this problem? And then is it so surprising that Israelis would go for what we could call an American solution, which is like in the 19th century, the United States didn't say, okay, great. We stop at the Mississippi and then the native Americans can have everything west of here, right?
The process is continued because there was nothing to stop it. Right. And so the system of, of norms and restraints or whatever that [01:56:00] exists. in 2024 are simply far too weak to stop this process, at least so far.
SECTION D: HISTORICAL CONTEXT
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next, Section D, Historical Context.
Why Palestinian Liberation Threatens the US Imperialist Order, w- Bikrum Gill - BreakThrough News - Air Date 5-21-24
BIKRUM GILL: And I think the examples that you raise particularly around the, the, um, the proxy war in Syria and in Libya and even Ukraine, I think those are very important, um, examples that are part of an interconnected project, uh, to maintain US imperialism.
Right? So I think, again, the first point to emphasize once again, is that the conquest of Palestine, the colonization of Palestine, the subjugation of Palestine, this genocide. Um, these are not things that are simply only about Palestine itself. Of course, we don't want to minimize the Palestinian national question and the question of Palestinian sovereignty.
But the denial of sovereignty to Palestinians, and again, the conquest of Palestine is a part of a broader regional project that is a, that is core to the exercise of U. S. global power. Right. And before that British global power. So what do we mean by that is that we know from British imperialism's embrace of Zionism and [01:57:00] it's.
Working with Zionism, a key objective there is to establish, um, at a very basic level, imperialist control over the hydrocarbon wealth. Now, of course, you can do this through local proxies, the Saudis and other client states, right? But there is a way in which Zionism is understood to be a direct Western implantation in the region, right?
That can allow, uh, for a, a more acute and sharper, uh, form of political and military control and projection of power. in the region. Now that control over oil, um, and the link up it's had with the dollar has been key, like I mentioned, to, to U. S. imperial power and its projection across the world. So that's one point worth emphasizing, right?
That the, the conquest of Palestine is a part of a broader regional dynamic. to deny sovereignty to the peoples of the region in order to control the flow of resources into and out of the region, um, in a way that benefits U. S. capitalist imperialism. So that's one thing. Now the second point though is, in [01:58:00] isolating Palestine from the broader regional dynamics, The point is to weaken Palestinian resistance, and it behooves the left and those in solidarity with Palestine to understand this, right?
If you're in solidarity with Palestine, but you're not attendant to the dynamics that are either strengthening or weakening actually material Palestinian resistance, Then you, what you risk doing is transforming your engagement with Palestine into one in which you, at most, what you can do is beg for the West or the imperialists to recognize Palestine and to save Palestine and to afford Palestine some autonomy, right?
But what are the concrete conditions for Palestine, Palestinian liberation, right? The concrete conditions are to challenge the terms through which Palestinians have been denied sovereignty and people across the rest of the region. Right now, how has this, this occurred is, well, it's been through the overwhelming military power that Zionism has exercised in the region vis a vis with the support first of British imperialism and then U.
S. imperialism, right? So now, to understand the example of [01:59:00] Syria that you emphasize here, um, we know that in the 1980s, of course, that the invasion of Beirut leads to the disarming of the, of the Palestinians, right? It leads to an Oslo road. Which is a part of the apex of U. S. Imperial power at the end of the century, the end of history.
There's no alternative. Get in line. Just play by the rules that the United States has set and the Western world more generally has set. So global South states, they have to beg for loans and credit and accept structural adjustment conditions. And in the Oslo framework, the Palestinians have to lay down their arms and basically depend upon them.
some idea of U. S. beneficence or goodwill to ensure that they will eventually get a state that their land will not be stolen and etc. But we know that doesn't happen through Oslo. Land theft accelerates and there is no road to Palestinian sovereignty because there's no material basis to it because the Palestinians have been Disarmed in the lead up to Oslo, but what else is happening in the region?
Of course, [02:00:00] we know that the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, um, the, uh, eventual emergence of an axis, a corridor between Iran, Syria and, and, uh, and Hezbollah that establishes an actual material force, a material basis with which to challenge us. Zionist and U. S. imperial power in the region, right?
So there's a material basis being built through which now there can be a shift from dependency, right, from a certain kind of begging and hopefulness that imperialism will grant you rights to actually raising up a military power, a force capacity that can become the real basis for sovereignty. What is sovereignty, right?
Exercising sovereign power over your resources, your lands, your labor. In a way that is not dependent on an imperial power. Well, then you need to have a force to be able to stand up to the imperialists and the colonizer. So this is being raised up through this emerging alliance in the [02:01:00] 80s and 90s and 2000s.
And we know, of course, we've discussed this before, but, uh, Hezbollah is very successful in doing so. And in 2006, when they defeat, uh, Israel actually to take a step back, you know, the The successes of Hezbollah in the 1980s and 90s is what inspires the Palestinian Second Intifada, which again then introduces this equation of force through which settlers are expelled from Gaza.
So we're seeing a different road emerging, a real road to real Palestinian sovereignty, which is a part of a road to broader regional sovereignty for peoples across the region more generally. Right. Now, how do the imperialists respond is you have Tony Blair speak of a Shia Crescent in 2006. You have the King of Jordan using the same language, right?
And, and, you know, actually Jordan and Egypt are very good examples here of how you have these two states that maybe at one point represented strategic depth for Palestinian resistance. At one point represented a. a, a, a depth of, of, uh, supporting armed struggle of armed resistance in the [02:02:00] sixties and seventies, uh, earlier, uh, then, then become a actually, uh, um, a support for Zionism and imperialism, right?
So this is what's being attempted to be imposed upon Syria after 2006. Syria becomes clearly a target to disrupt this, uh, a weapons corridor to disrupt the material basis of a rising challenge to imperialism in Zionism that is both inspiring and supporting Palestinian resistance. Right. So, insofar as there is an attempt to de link these struggles, right, to de link, uh, Palestinian liberation struggle from the U.
S. attempt to repress, uh, this axis by conducting a proxy war in Syria, right, this is a very, um, it has certain very risky implications, right, because what it will do is it will again and again return Palestinians to a dependent state. Right. And when you remove Uh, if you smash the Syrian state, you smash the Libyan state.
If you destroy Yemen, if you destroy all of these [02:03:00] regional forces that are actually constructing a power, a real concrete power to challenge imperialism, then you will leave Palestine again isolated and dependent and what, uh, only hoping for the goodwill of Western civil society. Right? So I think that is really, I think one thing that I would emphasize very strongly is that The maintenance of the axis of resistance, the maintenance of resistance forces in the region is really pivotal to actual real Palestinian sovereign reclamation going forward.
But that's not just for Palestine. That's for the whole region, right? Like I think, uh, then for the people of Yemen to exercise real sovereignty, the people of Syria, uh, people of Libya, uh, in Iran and elsewhere, to actually have a sovereign basis. Um, it is a broader regional question as well.
Palestinian Writer Mohammed El-Kurd on -Perfect Victims- & Israel's Criminalization of Thought - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-11-25
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: As you go around the country presenting Perfect Victims, you hear about this bookstore being closed — the owners being arrested. Your thoughts? And the [02:04:00] significance of going after the books?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, I think this is — the attack on the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem is yet another saga in the Israeli regime’s scholasticide, the attack on culture, scholars. You know, we’ve seen them literally bomb every single university in the Gaza Strip. And the Educational Bookstore is, in fact, not the first bookstore in Jerusalem to be closed down, its owners arrested.
So there is, you know, a criminalization of thought, a criminalization of the intellect, really. And we’ve seen this extend even to the realms of social media, where so many thousands of the people who have been arrested in the past 15 months have been arrested over Facebook posts. So, the Israeli regime really is waging a war of consciousness against the Palestinians’ ability to express national sentiments. And we see this also here in the United States with President Trump saying things like people who — students who support the resistance will have their visas [02:05:00] revoked. So there is an attack on, you know, the intellect itself.
JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Mohammed El-Kurd, you ask why Palestinians have to preface their support for the struggle against the occupation with some kind of statement distancing themselves from resistance actions like the attacks of October 7th of 2023. Why is this problematic, while supporters of Israel are never expected to decry the everyday violence of the occupation?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Because it’s racist. Because there is an impossible standard. There is an impossible demand made of the Palestinians to be, you know, for lack of a better expression, perfect victims, to portray themselves with this ethnocentric civility that adheres to Western guidelines; otherwise, they would be deserving of death, they would be deserving of being bombed. And to reject this is to say that the Declaration of Human Rights is [02:06:00] unconditional, and it’s universal. And to reject this is to say that, you know, we believe in dignity. We don’t believe in having to shrink ourselves or to perform a different script in order to be awarded freedom and dignity. These are things we are entitled to.
JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And I wanted to ask you about the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This became a flashpoint, is still a flashpoint, in the United States for attacking pro-Palestinian groups for being antisemitic or anti-Israel. Yet many in the Israeli government, in the current Israeli government, actually support “from the river to the sea” as an Israeli state, and no one raises a fuss about it.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, of course, because the issue is not the statement itself. The issue is who says it. The Israelis could say “from the [02:07:00] river to the sea” and more. They could say all kinds of explicitly genocidal statements. And yet, with us, they have to read between the lines. They have to infer and look for the hidden insidiousness in such chants. But it’s comical, in my opinion, that we are being often interrogated about our chants, about what we say on social media; meanwhile, when we talk about them, we’re talking about bombs and airstrikes and burning people alive in their tents in hospital beds.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Mohammed, before we talk about your title, Perfect Victims, I just want to ask about your background, because we repeatedly interviewed you here and when you were in Sheikh Jarrah. And for people to understand that neighborhood and what happened there and the people involved being the leaders of Israel today, talk about the occupation of Sheikh Jarrah and what happened in your own home.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, I mean, the story of our home is as unique and [02:08:00] absurd as it is common. This is a neighborhood where tax-exempt charities registered in the United States, settler organizations, Jewish American organizations, will come and claim our homes by divine decree, and they will exploit an already asymmetrical judiciary that is built by settlers for settlers to say these are — “Your homes are ours, and we have the right to kick you out of them.” And so, I, like many, many Palestinians, grew up with, quite literally, an American settler in my house. And it’s —
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Wait a second. Now, you’re 25 right now.
Twenty-six, yeah.
Twenty-six.
Yeah.
When was your home — were you forced to share it with someone who wasn’t in your family?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: It was about 2009. 2009, I came home from school, and half of our house was going. There was a settler inside it, a settler from Long Island. And, you know, right across the street from us, our neighbors, the Ghawi family and the Hannoun family, had lost the entirety of their home to settler organizations. And [02:09:00] across the years, these settler organizations have gotten more and more funding. And like you said, their accomplices and people who work for them and people who lead these organizations have found their way increasingly to the government. But this is indicative of a larger, larger —
They set up offices in
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Sheikh Jarrah.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, they set up offices in Sheikh Jarrah. They kind of use our homes as the home bases to build their electability, their popularity, because the Israeli public is really eager to see this kind of desperation, to see this kind of brutality. And it invokes a sense of safety in the Israeli public to see their politicians literally in the backyards of Palestinians saying, “We will take these homes. We will Judaize them. We will colonize them.”
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And your home today?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, my home today, like eight others, we have managed, through a massive, massive global solidarity campaign, to postpone the expulsion orders. But we still hang in the balance. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years.
How does that fit into [02:10:00] your title, Perfect
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Victims?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, I mean, to do a global campaign and to demand solidarity for our neighborhood, you know, we were told and we were taught to perform this role of perfect — to read the script of the perfect victim.
So, to tell you more, you know, I grew up — as a child, as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, we would have journalists, diplomats, all kinds of people visit our neighborhood as if it’s some kind of zoo. And I remember, constantly, I would talk to them. I would show them, you know, photos of the brutality that the settlers did against us. And I would be pulled to the side by, you know, other concerned diplomats or journalists, and they would tell me, “You shouldn’t use this phrase. You should use that phrase.” And it got to a point that, even as a child, I would correct my grandmother when she would refer to the Jewish American settlers in our home as “Jewish.” I would say, “No, no. Don’t mention that.”
But this kind of obfuscation, this kind of omission was kind of [02:11:00] drilled into us. And then you grow up, and you have internalized this entire framework of editorializing yourself, of curating yourself in a way that is nonoffensive to the Western gaze. And then you begin to curate and editorialize all the people around you. You look at people who have suffered pager attacks in South Lebanon, people who have had their homes demolished in the Gaza Strip, and you think, “What is the way I can make this victim, this young victim, nonoffensive or compelling to a Western racist audience?” At some point, you have to liberate yourself from these shackles and say, “Actually, this is the victim. This is the oppressed, not the oppressor, not the perpetrator.” And we should shift our focus and scrutinize the perpetrators, the oppressors, the colonizers, the focal point and the root cause of all of the violence in Palestine, which is ultimately Zionism.
JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Mohammed, I wanted to ask you how Donald Trump’s recent comments on [02:12:00] Gaza tie into what’s at the heart of your book. He’s described Gaza as, quote, “a big real estate site” and basically said that he doesn’t believe Palestinians should be able to return once they’ve been removed.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, ultimately, this so-called conflict has always been about the land, and any obfuscation of that fact is simply dishonest. Zionist greed has always been about Palestinian land. American interest in Palestine has been about keeping up a certain status quo, a military status quo, in the Middle East, but it’s also been about exploiting natural resources. I mean, Gaza is rich in natural gases.
But what I think Donald Trump is doing is that he is dropping the script of the State Department, the official American script, and just saying things as they are without a filter. And that is helping [02:13:00] people understand the long-term American project, because as disgusting and as abhorrent as Trump’s comments were about creating property on the Gaza Strip, it would have never been possible had it been not for the Democratic Party and President Biden flattening Gaza and allowing the flattening of Gaza in the first place.
On The Ground in Gaza Serving the People in Palestine Part 2 - Rev Left Radio - Air Date 2-11-25
BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: Yes. And, and the, you know, you, you mentioned that the, there has been a history of You know, Muslims and Jewish people and Christians, in some instances throughout history, history in that area of the world, living in peace as, as more or less equals. And that's the thing that Zionism rejects. The very possibility that Jewish and non Jewish people in that area could live as, uh, you know, under a single government of equality, constitutional protections for all, and be seen as equal with one another.
So once you have a political ideology that says, I'm fundamentally, uh, hostile to the idea that I have to live as equals with these people. You're, [02:14:00] you're getting into fascism territory. Because that requires you to expel them, to denigrate them, to dehumanize them, and to teach children coming up in Israel.
You know, Israel always says, like, Hamas is teaching Um, you know, Palestinians to hate, hate Jewish people. But aren't, what are you doing when you inculcate Zionism? And actually what you do is this abusive weaponization of fear. Where you're saying, look what the Jewish people have been through. That's true.
These people want to do it again. The whole world hates you. Live in a state of perpetual fear and hatred of others. Because if you don't, then you will be preyed upon once again. So that's, when you tell that to an 8, year old kid. That's a form of sort of psychological abuse. Because it makes them feel. in a fundamentally hostile world where they grow up to feel like they have to do these sort of disgusting acts, because if they don't, then they're going to be set upon by the world and destroyed.
And, um, it just, it just ravages children in Gaza through the bombings and the malnutrition and the suffering. And even in, in, in so called Israel, where the [02:15:00] children are raised with this hate and this fear. That is imposed on them. It's all disgusting. It's all a crime against humanity.
WILLY MASSAY: Yeah, you've seen the videos of the Israeli settlers going into the hills of, uh, overlooking Gaza.
And watching, they call it fireworks. With their children. This is a birthday celebration. Watching Gaza being wiped out, being carpeted, you know, carpet bombed. That's why they call it fireworks. These sellers, for my, for, for, for us here in America. Think about that. Let that sink in. Taking your children, watching other children being bombed and being shredded by the bombs we paid for.
Think about it.
BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: Yeah. And when I, when I do think about that. Um, there's a [02:16:00] parallel in American history, um, where that occurred, which is in the Jim Crow South, and actually throughout the country, the lynching of, of black people became a community event, where white people would come out, bring their children, and they would stand around and watch a black person be lynched.
Here in Omaha, um, in the 1800s, Will, Will Brown, falsely accused of sexually assaulting, um, a white woman. was jailed, you know, in the downtown here in Omaha, was set upon by a white racist mob. They literally broke into the fucking jail, pulled him out, strung him up by lampposts, shot him over and over again, burned his body, dragged it through the street.
Um, the mayor that came down to try to stop it was also, he survived, but was strung up on the light pole. Um, it was a brutal chapter in this place that I live right now, Omaha, Nebraska, born and raised, not even the quote unquote South, where this horrific event happened. The National Guard had to be sent in just to stop the race riot.
Um, and so there is that parallel [02:17:00] in human history and it's the absolute fucking worst of humanity. Yeah. That, that aspect of, of humanity. It's grotesque and it is the evil aspect of, of our human nature.
WILLY MASSAY: Ain't a fool. As the American people, we have similar history to what is happening in, in Palestine today.
Different roads, checkpoints after checkpoints, settler colonialism, taking Palestinian lands by force. Gaza. We learned from history, my friends out there, we learned, we know what we did to the black folks in America. We cannot watch the same thing happen to the people in Palestine. Let me tell you something.
I saw, I saw this, I saw children shredded by our bombs. How Can we allow that to happen knowing our own [02:18:00] history, if you speak who will, why will we watch a father lose his entire family by our, by, by our bombs and, uh, uh, you know, uh, from Israeli military forces and why will a mother be a, be, be a widow because her entire child, her entire family has been wiped out.
Why will these children today live in a world where they have lost both of their parents, annihilated by our bombs? And if we look back as American people, we know what we did from the example, Brett gave lynching. Um, you know, the total massacre of people here, slavery, we should be the beacon of hope, beacon of freedom and stop any, because we are, we have come a long way.
We're not a [02:19:00] perfect union yet. We have still have some of those elements of racism, fascism, all that. But We have come a long way. Those who don't remember history are condemned to repeat it. Absolutely. That's George Santana. Yeah.
BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: So, absolutely. Absolutely, I don't think you can understand the present and you can't even understand yourself if you don't understand history.
Um, and I, I believe that the Americans that are apathetic, that look away, that, that remain silent, you dehumanize yourself. It's too easy. I mean, it's easy if you're an American right now to just be like, Hey, it's out of my control. What can I do about it? I'm just going to look away, um, and focus on my personal life.
When you do that, you disconnect yourself from your own humanity. And you, you, you belittle yourself, spiritually, existentially. You know, in all the ways that matter, you become a smaller person, and it hurts to see, it hurts to look, and to know that in some sense, because we're a part of this death machine, [02:20:00] by paying taxes and working and all that stuff, that we are in some sense complicit, and what that should bring about is not a sense of passive shame, but a profound sense of responsibility, that if I'm going to, if they're doing this in my name, if I'm paying for those bombs, If my government is doing this, you know, with my tax dollars and in my name, I have a responsibility to look, to be educated, to do whatever I can to contribute to it stopping, to speak out bravely and courageously, and to inform others about it.
And that's, that's a, that's a responsibility no matter if you have a platform or not, if you, you know, you live in a small town or a big city where whatever your life circumstances are, you can take that responsibility up or you can look away from it. And that, there's two different types of people, the people that pick up that responsibility and the people that turn away.
And I understand, to some extent, I'm, I'm, I have compassion for wanting to look away. Because it fucking hurts. It, it brutalizes you to look into the, the eyes of suffering human beings. And, you know, there's a human recoiling away because of that pain. But I think opening up your [02:21:00] heart, facing that pain courageously, and then taking on the responsibility that comes with it, is the only thing that, like, a spiritually mature human being can do.
SECTION E: RESISTANCE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, section E, resistance.
The World After Gaza-- Pankaj Mishra on Decolonization & the Return of -Rapacious Imperialism- - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-13-25
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Well, you know, I think the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it. So, I think, you know, it forced many of us to reexamining not just sort of narratives of Middle Eastern history or Israeli history or Palestinian history, but a kind of broader [02:22:00] history of Western supremacism, of decolonization.
You know, we also saw a massive global divide open up in the responses to the atrocities in Gaza, with South Africa, country like South Africa, taking the lead in bringing a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. And, of course, we can now see South Africa is being severely punished by Trump and Musk for daring to do this. We saw public opinion in most of the world really shocked and appalled by the disproportionate Israeli response, and at the same time, you know, that public opinion asking questions of Western democracies, like “What happened here? Why are you supporting this endless massacre of thousands and thousands of people?” So, you know, in a very sort of — I think I would say that I find myself in a situation of a lot of people who were completely bewildered [02:23:00] by the Israeli response to October 7. And, you know, at least I have this option of turning my anguish or turning my bewilderment into some way of — some way of trying to understand this through writing, through prose. But, you know, it remains — it remains a baffling, a baffling episode, and, of course, we’re now entering the most intense part of it.
You know, you just described, whether it’s Ukraine — I’ve just been listening to this program now for 45 minutes, and this, you know, vast panorama of violence, disorder and suffering that we’re seeing today. And I think it’s really important not just to think about the past or the history, the larger history, of what is happening in Gaza today, but also about the present. And that is also something I describe in the book, whether Gaza signifies something more than just the latest [02:24:00] episode in a long-standing conflict in the Middle East. Does it portend the arrival of far-right, racial supremacist regimes across the Western world? So, I would argue — and I have said this in the book — that we are looking at a far more extensive moral, political and, I would say, intellectual breakdown than we have known, certainly in our own lifetimes.
And that, perhaps, Pankaj, explains the title of your book, The World After Gaza, which suggests that there’s, in your view, some kind of rupture, that the world is somehow substantively different, it will be different, after this assault on Gaza ends, in the event that it does and what form it takes. So, if you could say something about that, and then also the point that you made earlier about decolonization? It’s a theme that runs throughout the book, in which [02:25:00] you say, correctly, I think, that the seminal event of the 20th century for the vast majority of the peoples of the world was decolonization. Why is that significant when we look at what’s happened in Gaza and the response to it?
Well, I think, very simply, decolonization was not just a political event. It was not just, you know, a whole lot of nation-states in Asia and Africa becoming sovereign, becoming liberated from their European masters. It was also a profound emotional and psychological moment of liberation. I think, you know, from the 19th century onwards, the world was knit together by a very explicitly racial mode of imperialism and capitalism. And I think, you know, some of the best people in Asia and Africa fought against this global regime, and finally won, starting the mid-20th century, and created these [02:26:00] nation-states that exist all across Asia and Africa and are becoming both politically, economically and geopolitically more assertive. And there’s also a mental revolution also going on, has been going on for several decades.
So, I think, for many people in the West, who have been absorbed with a very different narrative — first of all, the narrative of the Cold War, the narrative of the end of history, the narrative of American unipolar dominance — decolonization still comes as a kind of news, or they confuse it with people asking for decolonizing knowledge in the United States or decolonizing educational syllabuses. So, I think there’s a very broad confusion about this world.
But what it really signifies is greater political, intellectual assertiveness [02:27:00] and a very fierce desire to not live in a world where racial privilege, most specifically white privilege, orders and forces a global hierarchy. You know, you can see this very clearly in sort of South African president a few days ago making a speech and saying, “We will not be bullied.” You know, Trump is imposing very severe sort of measures against the country, and there they are standing and saying, “We’re going to push back.” And likewise, I think you will find that kind of resistance in different parts of the world. And, of course, you know, what happened in Gaza shocked, appalled people from Indonesia to Brazil. That is also something, you know, that can really only be explained, this global divide, if you think about decolonization creating a new subjectivity, a new mentality, a new way of looking at the world.
And, Pankaj, maybe President Trump [02:28:00] understands this very well, as he repeated his claim that the U.S. is preparing to take control of Gaza, own it, while permanently displacing the territory’s entire population of 2 million Palestinians. I want to just play that short clip of him sitting next to Jordan’s King Abdullah for talks on Gaza at the White House on Tuesday.
We’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.
What does that mean?
There’s no reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it.
So, there you have President Trump saying not just we’re going to buy it, we’re going to own it — we’re going to have it — again, trying to push back on this whole trend, this whole move in the 20th century, of decolonization.
Well, you know, this is the strangest thing, really, you know, that the United [02:29:00] States is going back — and that is part of the great American unraveling — it’s going back to a 19th-century model of rapacious imperialism that’s interested in territory, that is grabbing resources wherever they can find it. And this Ukraine deal you were just talking about, that is now so much about resources that Trump has eyed in Ukraine.
So, I think, you know, this is something that people have been talking about for a very long time, that the structures and mentalities of racial imperialism in the 19th century are very much alive. People like that were dismissed as woke, as politically correct. But we are now seeing a kind of real-time, live verification of those insights into the nature of the modern world. And, you know, what Trump is saying today is bringing a very refreshing kind of clarity. We can see how this wealth, how this great power [02:30:00] was slowly accumulated, and how people, fearing the loss of that power because China is rising, China is becoming dominant, are — you have the most powerful people in the world resorting to the most naked form of expansion, the most naked forms of appropriation.
Why Palestinian Liberation Threatens the US Imperialist Order, w- Bikrum Gill Part 2 - BreakThrough News - Air Date 5-21-24
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: But there was this one Israeli American woman. Called Emily. Um, and she, you might remember that she made this claim and she made it repeatedly. Uh, seriously, sitting through this was like, it was like a form of torture. To have to just listen to these people's insane talking points.
But she kept saying that Iran is a colonizer. She was trying to use the words colonizer and imperialist. She tried to say that I don't know what they mean and she does. And that it's actually Iran that's colonizing Lebanon, and it's an imperialist power in the region. And I mean, she sounded insane, but there are people who, who believe this because it's said so often about Iran.
Like Iran is like a, or there's this term like sub imperialism, um, that some sort of like a [02:31:00] certain strain of, of people in the left sphere. We'll use when referring to a country like Iran, but you know, Israel supporters do like to like project, you know, Israel's colonialism and imperialism onto Iran and say, it's Iran that's imperialist.
It's Iran that's colonizing Lebanon. But you know, I want to emphasize Bikram and you know, this as an academic, that these words have actual meanings, like imperialism and colonialism have a def, they both have a definition. So can you explain to our viewers why Iran does not qualify? As an imperialist, let alone colonial power.
BIKRUM GILL: Yeah, absolutely. I think the, you know, the, to understand say colonialism and imperialism, right? It's very clearly these are, these are two, um, and just, I think maybe for your, your viewers and listeners, um, I recently gave a lecture at Middle East critique where I think I go into this in a lot more detail.
Like it's a very long kind of lecture where if, if people want some more longer definitions, but very briefly, you know, like [02:32:00] colonialism and imperialism is. is a is a set of relationships through which either colonizing power or an imperial power is going to um organize and dominate the colonized society the subjugated society in a way that denies sovereignty to those people in order to transfer resources and surplus value from Uh, the colonized, imperially subjugated zone into the colonizer country or into the imperial core.
Right? So that's, I think, very key. It's not enough to say that if one country has a relationship with another through which they are maybe engaged in some forms of relations of power or they're engaged in some forms of military collaboration or cooperation or engaged. In a conflict in a neighboring country that that automatically qualifies as colonialism and imperialism.
That is a very simplistic rendering, right? I think one thing that I often emphasize is like, look to see, does the relationship between these two countries, does it generate relations of development and underdevelopment? Does it generate [02:33:00] relations? through which, say, Iran's presence somewhere is actively underdeveloping that country, is actively de developing and destroying the productive basis of that country in order to transfer wealth from that country to Iran.
Where can you find that? You can't find that anywhere, right? So I think that, that definition of surplus value transfer. Uh, a militarized or economic basis to a denial of sovereignty that is done to transfer wealth from periphery to core, from colonized to colonizer. We can't see that with the case of Iran and what I will further emphasize.
Is that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 is itself a response to the colonization of Iran, to the imperial subjugation of Iran, the neocolonial subjugation of Iran. Iran was the case par excellence in the 20th century, uh, of neocolonial subjugation. And, you know, the relations we were talking about. over U.
S. imperialism being premised upon domination over the flow of oil into and out of the region. You know, the coup that happens in Iran in 1953 is a very key part of that project. And [02:34:00] the Iranian revolution in 1979, why does it become so threatening to U. S. imperialism is because, in my view, it is actually a direct challenge to that 1974 coup.
U. S. Saudi relationship. Because the Iranian revolution does not seem, it stands with Palestinians from its inception. It's never abandoned the Palestinian cause. It's been given opportunities to abandon it. If the Iranians abandoned Palestine, you can, you can bet in one day they would be integrated into the region, right?
That all of this discourse around rights and democracy and all this stuff, this is not anything that has ever been a concern. We know this to the West. So if they would have abandoned Palestine and accepted U. S. Germany. You know, Iran could be integrated into the region by the U. S. In a day, those opportunities have been there.
But from the Iranian revolution that you can see the Iranian revolution and shout out to my haters. You know, there's a lot of Zionist who is like, Oh, my gosh, he he said the Iranian revolution. is premised upon expelling the U. S. from the region. Like, wow, that's a big, controversial claim to make. But just to restate this point
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: I mean, I think the Iranian Revolution
BIKRUM GILL: [02:35:00] says as much, too.
Exactly. Even, like, even Stephen Walter, like, these
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: boring
BIKRUM GILL: academics.
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: Yeah, I mean,
BIKRUM GILL: all these boring academics have made this point, right? But so the Iranian Revolution has excelled. It centers on a rejection and opposition to Zionism, but also the expulsion of U. S. imperialism from the region, understanding that there's no sovereignty to be had fully for Iranians or any people in the region while they are there.
So if you look at the history of Iran since 1979, whether one wants to be critical or supportive of any actions, what is very clear is The iranian position is often informed in the immediate sense by its direct security imperatives And its border regions right like that and that's something you can apply also to china and russia, right?
You can see the way in which those states operate on a very different logic through which they're not going to dominate and deny sovereignty in order to transfer surplus wealth from a periphery to a court. They're largely informed by, uh, security imperatives that are security imperatives in [02:36:00] response to the actual imperialist power in these regions, which is the United States, right?
So how does Iran operate in Iraq? Well, the Iranian presence in Iraq is going to be of a such to ensure that the United States can't go through Iraq and get to the doorstep of Iran, because we know that the next step is always regime change in Iran. Now, that's a very different logic than calling it an imperial or colonizing power, number one.
But number two, uh, Iran has been a very vital force to, um, different resistance forces in the region. Now that, that again, that's something that is a fact of the matter, right? Like you cannot understand. I think Amal Saad's work is very important in saying that Hezbollah is not a proxy of Iran. It's not a pawn of Iran.
These are allies in an axis. Iran has been a core part of that axis, right? Like it has been a core part of just as Iran learned from North Korea, uh, how to develop an endogenous weapons production capacity. They have also helped to diffuse that knowledge [02:37:00] across the region. So when you understand Yemen or his, uh, answer Allah or his bullet, how they Stood up as such sovereign forces that have endogenous force capacity.
You know, Iran is a key part of that question, right? So it has been key to the challenge to US imperialism in the region. It's certainly not operating according to the logics of imperialism and colonialism, uh, by any means. I think that's, that's important, uh, to emphasize, which doesn't again. That doesn't mean that any state doesn't have, uh, degrees of social discontent that people can analyze.
None of that does away with that, but it's to be very clear as to what is and is not happening and also to be clear of why Iran is targeted, right? Iran is targeted for the specific reason of how it challenges. U. S. imperialism in the region,
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: right? And then to speak to, you know, other, um, arms of the resistance axis.
I wanted to ask you to comment on the fact that we have groups like, like Hezbollah and Hamas, which are [02:38:00] Islamist groups. Um, Iran itself is a religion, religious country. It's, it has an, it has an Islamic, it's called like it's had this Islamic revolution. Um, So obviously there's a religious flavor to these, uh, movements and in the case of Iran, this country, can you explain why, despite all, all of that religious character, these are in fact, anti imperialist forces and that that's to say, you know, I'm not sitting here saying that they're like necessarily leftist forces.
I'm not, I'm not calling them leftist forces. They certainly have like socially conservative views and they're not necessarily all exactly the same. Like there's a lot of. Internal ideals that Hezbollah or Hamas might espouse that I would disagree with because I myself am not a religious person. Um, that said, these are still anti imperialist forces because again, imperialism has a definition.
So can you explain the meaning behind that? Why are they anti imperialist forces?
BIKRUM GILL: So I think to be, uh, they, they are definitely anti-imperialist forces to be [02:39:00] anti-imperialist. And I think, um, you know, you can go to, uh, ed has Nala. I think I, I caught a speech that he gave, uh, this is long back. I don't know, I just caught it in passing.
But it definitely exists 'cause I, I, I, um, and I often find Nala to be one of the sharpest geopolitical analysts of our times, actually. Like, uh, you know, when the 2006 war happens. And there's this moment of revelation, maybe it had occurred to the Hezbollah leadership before, that is actually U. S.
imperialism. That is the primary contradiction and oppressive force, right? That, uh, that, that, the head of
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: the snake, the head of the snake,
BIKRUM GILL: right? Yeah. So that became definitely the, the, the, the, the line and a clear, sharp, uh, understanding. So what does it mean to be anti imperialist, right? What it means to be anti imperialist is to challenge the basis of imperialism.
The challenge, the basis through which imperialism denies sovereignty To a people, uh, whether, uh, in a national context or in a regional context, right? So, very clearly, both Hezbollah and Hamas have constructed [02:40:00] a force capacity through which to do that, right? Now, that's why they are categorized as terrorist organizations.
by the United States. The United States is not going to, uh, uh, categorize any organization that's not challenging U. S. imperialism. That's actually the qualifying condition, right? Like if you're challenging the basis of U. S. imperialist power, you will be categorized as a terrorist organization.
Arab leaders to meet in Cairo on Gaza as ex-Jordanian FM urges dialogue for a political solution
ANCHOR, AL JAZEERA: To Amman now in Jordan to Jawad Anani. He's the former foreign minister of Jordan. Welcome, sir, to Al Jazeera. Good to have you with us. Um, it is indeed critical, isn't it, that both Egypt and Jordan, uh, step up and present this plan along with other Arab nations. Well,
JAWAD ANANI: it was actually indicated by Mr Trump himself that, uh, He was waiting for alternatives after, uh, the initial, uh, rebuff of the, of the plan which he had presented, uh, at the press conference on the [02:41:00] plane.
Um, so in a way, after meeting with his majesty in Washington, D. C. last week, so in a way, I think that. Mr. Trump himself is looking for alternatives, but the way it was originally put, there was no way on here. There was no way at all for either King Hussein or President Sisi to accept that proposal with the United States actually owns not Not only controls.
He didn't say control. He said we'll own it. And, uh, then we will, you know, put people there who will help, uh, uh, make it a Riviera, uh, you know, all the, all the language sounded so flashy. So, so enticing. It was too good to be true. And the proposal that, uh, both Egypt and, uh, uh, Jordan would undertake to host the refugees or the people of Gaza [02:42:00] 1.
5 million, the original figure was, uh, was too much for them to take, given the fact that they have been hosting refugees and beyond their capacity, and they are still overburdened with the fact that Yeah, with this fact.
ANCHOR, AL JAZEERA: So we've just been hearing that the proposal is to form a national Palestinian committee to govern Gaza, and that would be without Hamas involvement.
What levers do you think that, uh, both Jordan and Egypt and others can bring to bear on Hamas to accept the plan?
JAWAD ANANI: It's not going to be easy because, uh, Hamas, uh, right now, Judging from their, the behavior of the movement and the delivery of, uh, of all hostages dead or alive, uh, they have shown that they want to express the fact that they still exist.
They have the muscle, they have the [02:43:00] weapons, they have the power to threaten others if they are, if things don't go their way. Uh, however, the fact that, uh, you know, probably the best dialogue is to tell Hamas that you, whatever you have done. Uh, it was a reaction to what the Israelis have been doing in besieging the people of Gaza and not allowing them to have a decent living.
And so now your turn is over, you have done all that you can, and now it's about time to really think into, uh, think in political terms. Uh, as long as The Israelis make it a point that Hamas should be disarmed and should be depoliticized. Uh, then the question comes, then, are we dealing with the spoilers of peace?
If that is the case, then also we expect Israel to change its leadership because there is no way in heck that [02:44:00] Arab leaders can find a way. to convince the current government and, and it's very loose, uh, structure, uh, to, to accept any, uh, process that would eventually lead to the resolution of the, uh, Arab Palestinian dispute over, over the occupied territories.
Okay. And also creating a political reform, political solution, which would accommodate, uh, Palestinians in a way that would guarantee Israel's security as well.
Netanyahu's Gaza Disaster- The SHOCKING Truth Behind Israel's Defeat - Double Down News - Air Date 1-29-25
DAVID HEARST: Well, Israel has achieved none of the objectives it set itself 15 months ago. It set itself the objective of collapsing Hamas. Hamas is still very, very much a fighting force and it's in control of Gaza. The sight of Hamas in pristine Toyota Jeeps and new uniforms delivering the three hostages in the middle of Gaza City shocked.[02:45:00]
the Israeli public who'd been fed a diet of news saying that Hamas had been collapsed. Here they were, back again, emerging like ghosts from the rubble, being cheered by the crowds, in control, after 15 months of total war. And they said to themselves, What the hell's been going on? Why have over 400 of our soldiers died for so called total victory over Hamas?
Well, we can see before our eyes that the Hamas fighters have got pristine new uniforms and are in total control of Gaza. In fact, Hamas was recruiting at a faster rate than Israel could kill its fighters, acknowledged by Israel's own generals. It set itself the task of returning all of That's the two hundred and fifty some hostages that Hamas captured.
And most of the hostages that did die, died at the hands of Israel's own bombs. The only way of getting these hostages out alive would be a [02:46:00] deal with Hamas. So on all of those objectives, Israel has failed. And let's be absolutely clear about this. The main obstacle to an agreement with the ceasefire was not Hamas.
It was not the Qataris or the Egyptians, uh, it was not the Americans, not even, uh, the Israeli High Command. The terms of the agreement are very much what Netanyahu could have agreed to months, months earlier. Why didn't he do that? Well, because I think he wanted to keep his extremist ministers, Smotrich and Ben Gavir, in the cabinet.
And also because the Israeli public believed in his propaganda, that the best way of getting the hostages back alive was to pound Hamas. Of course, the exact opposite is the truth. It's much easier to say what Israel has lost in the 15 month war. And apart from national unity and national cohesion, I mean, if you think about it, this is the first time in Israel's history that there have been virulent and active [02:47:00] demonstrations against the war while a war was itself in operation.
So there's all that. going on inside Israel. But outside Israel, Israel has lost decades of diplomacy, of pressure, and of lobbying in Washington to paint itself as the good guy in the Middle East, surrounded by irrational Arab alien forces. It itself has lost A generation of American Jews, 40 percent of American teenagers support Hamas, 66 percent of American Jewish teenagers believe in the Palestinian cause.
They are seeing this conflict through the prism of the last 15 months in Gaza. Now, this point was made by Biden's departing ambassador, Jack Liu, who has not uttered a word of criticism to what was going on in Gaza throughout his very troubled tenure as ambassador. But his parting shot to Israel was you've lost a generation of American supporters and these are the future leaders of the country.
That is a very significant loss. You've also [02:48:00] got Israel in the dock of world opinion now. Trump will just ignore the ICC or try and collapse that as well, but it's still in the dock for genocide and it's still in the dock for war crimes and there are warrants out for the arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Galant and there are a myriad of court actions taking place in courts around the world which are tied and allied to that.
There's a court action against BP for supplying the oil that the Israeli military use. And there are many, many other cases. In fact, the Israeli army got so worried by the idea that their citizens could be arrested on holiday that they've now taken a great deal of action to disguise the identity of the officers who took part and who bragged about the killing field in Gaza on social media.
I mean, there are Basically two different wars that are being fought. Israel is fighting a western kinetic war aimed at eradicating the [02:49:00] leadership of a militant group that is fighting them in the hope that once that leadership goes then the fighters lose all discipline and all control and they give up.
And also in maximizing collateral damage, in terrorizing the population as a whole to make sure that they pay the maximum price for supporting Hamas or for allowing Hamas to continue. The other war that is being fought is a much, much longer term war, which has become a battle of wills. It's not the Palestinian fighters think that they can win any engagement against a vastly superior military force.
But what they can do is wear their enemy down. And by keeping on fighting one generation after another, that eventually Israel will be forced to negotiate with the Palestinians as equal citizens. on equal terms. [02:50:00] And this historically is the story of the liberation of Algeria. It's the story of Vietnam.
It took six more years for the Americans to withdraw after the Tet Offensive, which like The Hamas attack on October the 7th was deemed at the time to be a military failure, but which started a ball rolling that kept on rolling until America had enough and pulled out. America wasn't defeated militarily in Vietnam, it lost the will to fight it.
The French forces lost the will to stay in Algeria, even though at one point it regarded Algeria as an intrinsic part of France. So in the long run, the historical signs do not look good for Israel. In the short term, they can win every single confrontation with maximum damage, but Gaza showed that the people can resist that and still survive and still be able to reconstruct from the ruins.
Gaza looks [02:51:00] like Hiroshima because in a sense it is. Actually it's two Hiroshima's within the first month. Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza than America did on Iraq in seven years of war. And more bombs than the allies dropped in the firestorms in Germany in the whole of the second war. That's the amount of firepower that was used against an enclave which was entirely cut off from the rest of the world and being starved.
And still. It didn't break Gaza's will, despite everything that was thrown at Gaza in 15 months. The bombs, the starvation, disease, everything that they endured. Total destruction over 80 percent of their housing. We've never seen figures like this, and we're still only coming to terms with it. with the contours of the scale of the destruction because we haven't toured Gaza from north to south.
That's still only just happening as we speak. As the [02:52:00] decayed bodies are being lifted from the rubble, the death toll will rise and rise and rise. The Lancet says there are three times as many dead bodies as have been claimed by the Palestinian Health Authority, which the mainstream media dismissed as Hamas run.
In fact, it was undercounting the death toll, not as Israel and the Western media would have it, overcounting it, undercounting it by a third. Gaza has shown that the human spirit will prevail and that despite everything that was chucked on it, it will not surrender, it will not wave a white flag, and it will march towards its right for a homeland, for equal rights.
and for self determination and sovereignty. Everything that Israel demands in its place is deserved by the Palestinians. And after the destruction of Gaza, no one, but no one in the world can argue that the [02:53:00] Palestinians don't deserve their own state.
Credits
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